Take Wing to the Baltic: Cruising Notes: UK to Copenhagen via the Netherlands & Germany

By Brian Thompson and Adela Thompson

They dreamed of escaping the rat race and cruising the world; in their late forties they made it a reality.

In 1987, after their children had grown up and left home, Brian and Adela Thompson threw caution to the wind. Retiring from full-time work, they sold their idyllic seventeenth-century cottage and downsized to a 'Tupp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mr.Brian Thompson
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781916387393

Brian Thompson

Brian was born in London near 'Bow Bells', making him a 'Cockney' just before WW11. After the war he grew up in Chingford where he met Adela. After their marriage, they moved to an ancient 16th century cottage in the sleepy village of Sheering, on the Herts/Essex border; they had two children, one of each sex. Brian taught his wife to sail on the Norfolk Broads along with the 'kids', and they bought their first boat in 1969, based on the River Crouch in Essex. Brian eventually became Commodore of the Hullbridge Yacht Club, a position he held for some four years. Kiebitz was their third boat and during its ownership, in 1986, they changed their base to the Walton Backwaters. They joined the Walton & Frinton Yacht Club and have been sailing from there ever since. Brian has 63 years of practical sailing experience, starting on the River Thames in 1951, and 38 years of teaching sailing and navigation, from 1974 to 2012.

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CHAPTER ONE

AN IDEA BECOMES REALITY

The idea was not new. Sailing to the Baltic had been an ambition for many years and I thought that was probably the way it would remain. My real sailing experience began at thirteen as a sea cadet in Chingford with regular trips to Ravens Ait on the London River and continued a few years later with many holidays on the Norfolk Broads where, after our marriage, I introduced Adela to sailing as a great family recreation. This nearly finished our relationship before it began. Amazingly she swallowed the propaganda and the ‘bug’ took a firm grip of her.

In 1969, we became proud owners of our first boat, Jonquil, a second- or possibly even third-hand, clinker-built 22-foot cruiser racer with fractional rig, built to an award-winning design by the Dutch marine architect Baron Van Höevell when money and materials were in short supply in the immediate postwar period. The shortage of money was still applicable to her new owners in 1969.

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Jonquil our first boat, as found at the Medway Cruising Club in Kent. A 22-foot Boomke class designed by Baron Van Höevell, a Dutch marine architect.

She had been raced regularly and her accommodation was extremely spartan: two straw mattresses and a tiny galley. At the end of that season we transported her to the garden of our cottage where she rested for 18 months, undergoing an internal ‘transplant’ and an external ‘facelift’, emerging as a four-berth family cruiser drawing many admiring comments. She was equipped with an air cooled, horizontally opposed, twin cylinder petrol engine that hated its home and turned a deaf ear to the ‘sweet nothings’ I murmured into its air intake.

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After the first season of use Jonquil was taken home and moored in the garden.

She was tidied up, fitted with a newly constructed pulpit and pushpit plus guard wires. She sported new berths and galley, plus a proper marine toilet. The engine and drive gear were also overhauled, although these were completely replaced with a new Stuart Turner a couple of years later.

Jonquil had taught us a lot about boat husbandry and a little about offshore sailing. We even had the temerity to take her to Holland, but that’s another story.

Two boats and sixteen years later, I was 48 and tired of selling my soul and my business ideas outside the sailing world with bosses forever pushing quotas and targets higher. I had often spoken about early retirement, believing it to be wasted on the elderly. But talking about it was one thing, taking the decision to act quite another.

Adela and I took many a stroll in the snow-covered fields around the village in the winter of 1986 and spent many heart-searching evenings sitting in the warm glow of burning apple wood, beside our inglenook fireplace in the soothing surroundings of our 17th century cottage.

The cottage had been our home for 23 years. Now with the children able to fend for themselves we did not envisage spending the rest of our lives supporting an ancient monument, however lovely. Old cottages were fashionable and the time had come for ours to supply us with the means of starting a new chapter in our lives. Where, however, were we to live after selling?

We considered becoming permanent boat dwellers, but being butterfly brained we required other interests to sustain us through the winter months. Although we might sometime join the Mediterranean sun worshippers, to begin with we had set our sights firmly on the Baltic.

By continuing as a part-time RYA Yachtmaster Instructor, a modern Tupperware semi would leave us with most of the summer to pursue our new ambition. This new home had to be within easy reach of the boat, a luxury we had watched other boat owners enjoy in the past. When they were happily sailing, we were busily commuting.

Flexibility in planning is as important ashore as at sea and several course adjustments were necessary before reaching our ultimate goal. They took the form of Plan No. 1 through 12, plus, of course, endless modifications. It all became something of a family joke.

Time resolves most problems if there is enough to spare. After considerable research on the East Coast, we settled within five minutes’ cycle ride of our boat, on the Walton Backwaters.

Our imaginary cruises to the Baltic, of course, were aboard a 35-footer, with all imaginable conveniences. It soon became clear that it would not be easy to separate ourselves from our current and third successive boat, Kiebitz, who was dear to our hearts and always seeming lucky in repaying all the time and attention we spent on her. She was owed one last big cruise, hopefully the first of many, to a new, exciting area. Kiebitz is a 'Wing 25' designed by Colin Mudie & E.G. Van de Stadt. Her main dimensions can be found at the back of the book.

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Our third boat was Kiebitz, a Wing 25 class, and she was also found in Kent at Sittingbourne, in her then owners garden. Her normal mooring was on the Medway at Sheerness at that time. We moored her on the River Crouch in Essex, and finally in the Walton Backwaters.

Someone once said: Far and away the most important ingredient to going anywhere is the determination to go. If we were to take Kiebitz to the Baltic, and we dearly wanted to, then a lot required doing. She would have to come ashore and stay ashore for at least a year. Oh! By the way, Kiebitz is German for ‘Lapwing’, no connection with Israeli collective farming! We inherited the name from her previous owners.

Kiebitz was bought ‘warts and all’. We knew she had a superficial attack of osmotic blistering, the dreaded GRP pox, but we were confident we could rectify this. She was, after all, built at a time when they used plenty of resin and glass in construction and had already been ashore for several years. After eleven years of ownership listening to a variety of ‘experts’ and lower deck lawyers, we learned to live with and to keep the problem in check.

John Titchmarsh lifted her out in the autumn of 1987, where she stayed until spring 1989. One of the many tasks was to fit a proper gearbox to the Lister air cooled diesel. This engine and drive (variable pitch propeller) had been with Kiebitz since she was built in 1970. The arrangement may have been alright for weekend sailing but was certainly no use for what we had in mind. Try as we could we found no gearbox at reasonable cost to marry with the engine. The more we searched, the more obvious it became that a complete new engine would be the best proposition. Finally everything was replaced: engine, gearbox, even the engine beds, propeller shaft, bearings and a new fixed three-blade propeller. The boat was rewired and practically rebuilt under the critical eye of Peter N Davies, a local marine surveyor.

While the engineering was underway we had another go at the osmosis. As she was to spend a long time ashore, we decided to do the job properly. Peter even persuaded us to go much further than we thought was necessary. But, of course, he was the surveyor and we the labourers and, anyway, it was all worth it when she was finished. She looked born again, in her seven coats of solventless epoxy paint with a bright new bronze propeller hanging out of the stern. We also fitted a new pushpit, guard wires, jack stays and replaced some of the standing rigging. If both of us were to live for three months in a space not much bigger than the bathroom of an average modern three-bedroom semi, then all available space had to be fully utilised. Knowing the amount of equipment and clothing we had needed on our previous two- or three-week holidays made it difficult to imagine how much we would require for three months and, above all, where we would store it.

With a two- or three-week holiday there is the temptation to take plenty of