Stormy Weather.....
Wells, Wells, Wells....... It actually isn't too wet. Here, at Wells-next-the-sea, North Norfolk, I am about to sail away..... courtesy of Coastal Exploration Co.
This isn't masochism.... I booked two different days out when we were suffering from the mediterranean delights of sunshine and heat..... So I imagined that both these days on the water would be warm and easy....
So, last Sunday, on the twenty foot lug-rigged crab boat 'My Girls' built in Sheringham in 1965, Penny and I entrust ourselves to skipper Nick and set sail at dawn from the port of Wells....
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It is a shining morning. August has gone, and this is, to my dismay, September. Cloudy. Cool.
A gleam across the salt marshes means that the day is waking up, but little stirs.....
It is quiet. The tide is hurrying in, but no one else is up and about. Except for the young swallows, getting ready for their amazing migration to Africa. Here they are swooping and feeding on the early flies above the waters, and resting on a silent, empty boat.....
I think, uncertainly, that this is what I love. I love to see the natural world at ease with itself. I love to observe birds and animals showing us, unselfconsciously, how they live. The scissoring flight (pace Ted Hughes) is spell binding:
The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.
Work and Play
Ted Hughes
Anyway. This is not everything. We sail out through the salt marshes,. The light is low, and I haven't brought my big camera with the 500 mm lens, so we listen and watch and let be. Sandpipers, oystercatchers, egrets, marsh harriers, redshanks, curlews and even whimbrel chatter and spin about, quick and fleeting across the dark levels of the marsh lands. Sea blight, sea purslane, asters and lavenders, merge with samphire and wormwood, rooted in the thick mud banks. The channels are scoured by the tides, but they are shallow, and we have to hug the outside of curves to stay afloat.....
On this, my second outing, we are in a 16 foot lug rigged mussel flat, built in about 1960.
It is easy in the creeks and shallows, and we sail gently with the wind:
Ahead of us, almost a John Craske picture, My Girls tacks toward Blakeney Point to see the seals.....
And, despite our lack of keel and shallow draught, we attempt to catch up..... To see the curious seals.....
And then, shore enuff, there they are, beached [Like Whales? Ed]
Stretched, virtually limbless, they are monstrous as they roll on the beach, but in the water they are peerless, able to disappear for long minutes, but bobbing up to question our place in the order of things:
Our sister ship has anchored, with the sail down, as they photograph the scene.
We eye the weather, clouds gathering:
Battleship grey on the horizon:
Heavy clouds weighing down across the salt marshes. I feel compressed, weighted down, the thick grey mass of wet sackcloth hanging above my head.....
There's a ragged clown out there, with heavy blue rain triggering feelings for the fishermen who daily wrestle with the elements to bring oily protein to our tables.....
And, even when the sky lightens, it is still a relief to be cruising home:
We shelter in a muddy inlet in the salt marsh to restore ourselves on Baron Bigod and whelks, soup and pork pie.....
And then it is time to slip back to our moorings in Wells.....
Where industrial shadows still hang over us, and some things somehow don't seem quite right:
But the crowds still love their crabbing:
It has been an adventure, and I am grateful to Nick and Alfie and all at Coastal Exploration Co. who made this possible. But also thanks to my companions on these brief explorations of the North Norfolk Coast. It is an inspiring world, so different from that we see from the land, so quiet and so natural.
And love to the seals......
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| I am watching you..... |
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold