Katie and I arrived back in Orford, intending to anchor and cross the Ore Haven Bar on the following morning. The ‘bar’ is a large shifting bank of deposits where the river meets the sea. This means shallow waters and crashing breakers. You need high water in order to cross. However, to reach the River mouth at high tide, you must battle against the incoming tide. In order to avoid this, I decided we would sail down river on the ebb tide (easy), anchor up and cross the bar on the following morning’s high tide (hopefully easy).
We had a lovely evening sail down towards the Ore river mouth in very light winds. As we approached the mouth, however, and I attempted to turn the engine on – nothing happened. No turnover, no clicking starter, nothing… this despite it having worked perfectly for the 7 years I’ve had the boat and had just got us off the moorning an hour earlier in Orford.
I went below and grabbed my diesel engine self-help book but my crew pointed out that the current was getting faster and that Shingle Street (a row of white houses opposite the shallows) was now well in sight.
I ran up, turned the boat and attempted to sail back up river, but by now the current was flowing out to sea at about 4 or 5 knots so we were just going backwards…
I ran forward and hurled out the anchor and 30 metres of chain and we ground to a halt, dead centre of the river in the strongest part of the current…
It felt a bit like water-skiing… or an ice-axe arrest or something…
I issued a rather garbled pan-pan to be on the safe side, but told them that the anchor was holding, so I wasn’t overly overly concerned.
It was a very scary three hours… we were located beyond the Ness among the earily martian-esque shingle banks but had good depth (6m min) throughout. It was a chilly, but almost windless night with shooting stars and curling phosphoresence gathering around the anchor and marking out the wake from the gradually slowing current.
The tide eventually turned around 1:00am, we pulled up the anchor and crept under sail at about 1 knot back to Orford, where we sailed onto a mooring at 4am and crashed out.
The following day, the Orford HM very kindly tried to get us started, but it wasn’t happening. We rang Upsons in Aldeburgh and sailed back up river. There, Mr Upson met us, towed us onto a mooring, and we caught the bus back to Katie’s mum in Norfolk. Again, the whole venture seemed in doubt…
Update – engine failure was down to poor corroded electrical connections in the switch panel… and heating element – both seemed to have failed simultaneously…
Unfortunately, we were far too scared to take photos… this image shows the various sandbanks at low tide – we were precariously anchored in the middle at the top where the sandbank first starts to break up…
Bob's Big Adventure 