TRADING PLACES

It was appropriate the wind was blowing northeasterly as the spring rain dimpled the Blackwater estuary, for a breeze in this quarter has for centuries held northbound trading vessels within the confines of the Thames Estuary.

Out in the river, Cambria’s bob fluttered furiously at the truck of her topmast as Richard Titchener, head of the Sea Change Sailing Trust and, today, skipper of the last trading sailing vessel to fly the red ensign, nosed the heavy barge skiff into the rusty old lighter, which serves as a pontoon at Heybridge Basin, Essex.

Here waited a charterparty of folks eager to discover what it was like to sail in an engineless trading ship, among them myself and Phil ‘Ginger’ Latham, both, at different times, former mates of the Cambria, invited back aboard to help bring the experience alive.

Once the passengers were alongside the barge they had a wooden ladder to clamber up on deck: in our day a foothold on a half-lowered lee-board would have sufficed.

Bags stowed, it was time to get under way: the barge was just starting