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East Anglia is a beautiful area of Britain and boast wonderful scenery ranging from beaches where you can observe the bird life or the seals to the forests of Thetford.
Norfolk and Suffolk offer a wealth of magical places to holiday, full of water activities, great adventures and lots of attractions for the whole family to see, history to experience and great food to eat.
Blakeney Harbour Quay
There will be info about holiday accommodation as well as boat hire and river trips in Norfolk and Suffolk.
The well renowned East Anglian boat race The Three Rivers, will be upon us shortly so here is a little story from a number of races ago….
Ah well, another Three Rivers Race fast approaches and as each year passes and I mentally congratulate myself fro not taking part as I remember back with a shudder, my one experience of this race (never to be repeated I might add!).
It was many years ago and took place on a beautiful sunny weekend which just happen to coincide with a visit home from parts foreign for me and James. We decided to take a long awaited break from yachting, return to Norfolk and catch up with old friends.
Over a pint or two, a good friend Ian a seasoned Rivers race man, asked if we would like to crew him in the Three Rivers Race, due to start in a couple of days time. Not being of sound mind because of jet lag and several bottles of grog, we said we would love to! We missed the gleam in his eye – little did we know!
Come the big day, we tottered onto Ian’s white boat and stowed our many layers of clothing, waterproofs, egg and bacon sarnies, thermos flasks etc and made ready for departure. The wind was fresh and steady and the sun shining. Before setting off I did venture a most important question to our skipper – what do we do about a loo? The short reply was – Use the bucket!
I have never been prudish but the thought of squatting on a little bucket in front of two blokes was a bit of a push! So I thought perhaps if the wind continued a steady blow and if I did not drink anything and kept all thoughts of full bladders out of my mind then perhaps I would make it to the finish, dignity intact.
We set off without incident, creaming along before a fresh breeze with the sun blazing down enjoying all the wonderful wildlife to be seen along the riverbanks and all was well in my world.
As the sun gradually sank below the horizon, a chilly river mist descended. And the wind disappeared. We were freezing having been used to a steady 87 degrees in the Caribbean and so donned all our spare clothes, waterproofs, hats, gloves and huddled up to keep warm. Hot soup, tea and coffee were eagerly consumed – not by me – and the lads occasionally stood on the aft deck and er, whistled. I put my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing the sound of tinkling music!
Come daybreak with the wind was not playing the game at all, we found ourselves slowly tacking back and forth across the river making very little headway and I could bear it no more, I was about to burst and I whispered (why is it we always whisper when the winds are light – do we think we might use up to much wind by speaking normally therefore sail slower?) to my captain that I needed a potty stop. He whispered something about a bucket and he denied vehemently that he was joking!
However when I pointed out that he either put me on the bank or I would pee in my pants which would eventually end up in the bottom of his boat, he reluctantly put me ashore on the next tack, hissing as he left me stranded that I would have to run and catch the boat up on the next tack or else!
Needless to say I had been deposited on the most densely nettled part of the river bank and as luck would have it, the wind decided to pick up so by the time I had battled with the layers of trousers and waterproofs, stamped an large enough area of nettles down to accommodate my backside and done the business, the white boat was disappearing into the morning mist at an alarming rate!
I set off at a gallop, heaving my trousers and waterproof bottoms up as I went. Spurred on by the shouts of “Hurry up and shift your arse, I was gaining on them slowly when suddenly I had to screamed to a halt – there was a dirty big ditch blocking my path, too wide to jump! I yelled for them to come back, half expecting them to say “You stay there and we’ll pick you up on the way back” however and with a great deal of huffing and muttering about ‘flipping woman’ and ‘losing places’, the boat turned back and picked me up.
Silence reigned and no eye contact was made so feeling very chastened, I resolved to sit very still and quiet in the boat for the remainder of the race, but it is very hard thing to do when your bum is nettled and you can’t scratch!
However more torture was to befall us, ghosting along feeling really hungry and thirsty our soggy bacon sarnies and cold tea had somehow disappeared in the very small hours of the morning), we met a sailing cruiser drifting gently along in the opposite direction. Once we had passed, we ran into their ‘slipstream’ which was made up of the most glorious smells of fresh coffee and bacon! For two ticks we would have turned round and begged a hot drink and a bacon butty off them, but our skipper sat firm, the race had to go on…. We eventually crossed the finish line, heaved ourselves stiffly out of the boat and collapsed in the long grass in the warm sun and slept.
With racing finished and having downed the requisite bottles of beer, the guys had time to reflect on how we had done over the last 15 hours, whilst watching me wriggle about trying to scratch without being noticed. They did see the funny side and took great pleasure in my discomfort, which I might add, took sometime to get better. I resolved there and then never to do the Three Rivers again unless it was in a sailing cruiser with a loo, a kettle, a stove and a very large bottle of calamine lotion!
Imagine being on a pretty 50’ sailboat anchored in crystal clear warm water, sheltered from the long Atlantic swells behind a beautiful reef linking a chain of little islands off the coast of Antigua in the West Indies. The sun is beating down and you are sheltering under an awning, doing your best to get the right side of a large rum and coke!
You lean over the edge of the deck and watch a couple of rays fly their way under the boat and come to rest on the sand in the shadow of the boat and all you want to do is slip into the warm water armed with a camera, snorkel, mask and flippers and drift gently over the reef marvelling at the bustling life and the myriad of colours in and around the corals. Nothing to stop you is there? Except if you are the only one in the party that can’t swim! What to do?
On a number of occasions a charter guest would choose to remain on board the boat and not take part in any water activities and we would soon realise that they were non swimmers and for the most part, they would be very happy to be taken by dinghy to a beach armed with a cooler of something refreshing and to paddle, sit or lie in the shallow water whilst their friends got on with the task of swimming.
There were two notable exceptions to this one was the wife of one of our bosses. She was a tiny blonde woman who always dressed in skin tight catsuits and she had fondness for very long curly false eyelashes. She was also blessed with an enormous bosom which she called her built-in flotation aids – except of course they didn’t help her float! She seemed to have natural negative buoyancy so if she did fall in she went immediately to the bottom and stayed there!
So to counteract this she would put on a life jacket and inflate it to the max, water wings blown up until on the point of bursting and a rubber ring around the middle just underneath the enormous floatation aids, all topped off with her hair shoved in a flowery shower cap, goggles, snorkel and very long flippers which she insisted on putting on whilst on deck even though she had to negotiate a small ladder to get to the bathing platform! She looked a little like The Penguin’s (Batman villain) sister as she waddled down the deck.
Once in the water of course the sinking issue was solved, but with all this paraphernalia on, she was self-righting! Every time she put her face into the water, she would bob back upright again, so she still couldn’t snorkel but at least she tried and she always earned ten out of ten for entertainment.
The other exception was a pastor who was among six New Yorkers who chartered the boat we were running. He also seemed to suffer from natural negative buoyancy and had never been able to learn to swim.
We discovered that his ‘sinkabilitity’ factor when after anchoring the boat behind a small reef in about 15 feet of water. He suddenly jumped off the boat and plunged straight to the bottom. I watched him go in and casually glanced over the side to check he was okay and saw that he was strolling, not swimming about, under the water eyes open as though watching all the fish, seemingly unconcerned – well in takes all sorts I thought and wondered how long he would take before coming up.
He just remained on the bottom and after a minute or so, his movements started to look somewhat distressed. I asked his friends who were unaware of what was happening overboard, if it was normal for him to walk rather than swim about underwater and they leapt up shouting ‘My God he can’t swim’! So being the designated life guard on duty, I had to rescue him.
Once he had recovered from his near death experience, I asked him why he had jumped in – he said that the water looked so inviting and as it only appeared to be about five feet deep, he thought it would be fine to wade over to the reef and explore!
In the week he was with us, he never did learn to swim but he did became very fond of walking about under the water with his snorkel attached to a length of hose-pipe whose other end was fastened to a float so that he could literally move around underwater like a deep sea diver with his own air supply.
He did however walk on water – once. On his travels in fairly shallow water, he stepped round a large coral growth and came face to face with a large nurse shark. Shark and the Pastor took off at high speed in different directions.
He arrived back on board as though jet propelled and fell onto the deck kissing it repeatedly and muttering something about Moby Dick’s cousin, big mothers and lunch all in the same breath! It did put a bit of a dampener on his reef explorations………….
Crew life on a super yacht no matter what size, can be very hard work interspersed with wonderful moments of relaxation. Some crew would go off snorkelling or scuba diving. This was not for me, I was never very keen on being able to see the other creatures in or under the water with me, in fact rather large Barracudas seemed to know when I was swimming and made a point of hanging in the water just in reach of my peripheral vision!
We would take turns in driving the skiboat and learning ski tricks and eventually with great patience and after many high speed tumbles it was such fun to be able to ski off and back to the beach only getting wet from the knees down and I never saw those pesky Barracudas lurking underwater either!
All these skills swimming, diving, skiing, resuscitation came in very useful when guests were on board. Should they decide to have a go watersking it required four crew. One driving, one spotting, one in the water and one holding the towels on the swim platform! The two former jobs were taken by the Captain and the Mate, the latter by the stewardess and that left me in the water to help hold the learner upright, pointing in the right direction and ready for the off.
Eventually after much submarining, ploughing and huge amounts of salt water quaffed, not to mention the free enemas, they suddenly stand up and ski away. Their faces were always a picture, filled with delight and horror in equal amounts. Delight that they had achieved the impossible and stood up on skis and horror that it was all being done without the secure cover of their swimming costumes which by now were round their ankles!
It is just not possible as a novice skier to let go of the handle with one hand and pull the costume back up or indeed with the ladies, retrieve the cups of a bikini from under the arm pits and reposition them and remain upright!
So the only choices were to drop back into the water, adjust the offending garments and await rescue or brazen it out and be towed buck naked around the bay of moored yachts and past the crowded beaches hoping that no-one has noticed the personal air conditioning, until finally being returned to the Mother ship where sanctuary in the form of the stewardess holding a fluffy towel, demurely with her back turned, was waiting!
Funnily enough, this was the option that most people took. When asked why, most would grin, blush and admit that it had been such fun and they felt sure that nobody would recognise them if they set foot fully clad on the beach because they were convinced that no-one had actually looked at their faces! Do you know, they were quite right – nobody had!
