I’ve just taken a glance through my last two columns and it’s perhaps inevitable that the content reflects the sort of summer most of us have endured. They’ve concentrated on blocked loos, headwinds and all those things that drive us daft about boating. I doubt there’s a single reader who hasn’t faced up to the question, ‘Why am I bothering with all this grief.’ Logic may encourage the quitters to give up, but the rest of us soldier on through the storms of adversity, knowing that somewhere up ahead is a better deal.
And so there is. A magic weekend always turns up whose memory makes everything worthwhile. Let me share one of mine. It almost seems to hail from another era, yet it remains as real as it was on the day.
It’s a quiet Saturday morning on the Beaulieu River. The oaks in the New Forest are
