Frances and Bill Gale swapping memories of Alan

Frances was born and brought up in Sydney, and it was there that she first sailed, on her step grandfather’s beautiful, self designed Antares. Christmas 2011 saw one of our occasional returns to the land of her fathers, and we were delighted to be able to meet up and sail with the current owners of Antares Rob Keessen and Dennis Wood.
Fran was almost literally just off the plane from London, and found it the perfect cure for jet lag. We met at the prelapsarian Sydney Amateur Sailing Club in Cremorne, just opposite Fran’s family home at Mosman. What a fabulous club: more wooden boats than I’ve seen together outside a classics regatta, an amiable and competitive atmosphere, and a location that really couldn’t be bettered.

Rob Keessen, Pete Edwards and Fran, with the model of Antares

We went out for the last race of the season, in which Rob and Dennis had some unfinished business. An interesting day’s sailing, with a streaky breeze and pots of traffic saw them get their target boat. Ed was star-struck by finally being out on Sydney Harbour and wouldn’t stop talking, but the rest of the crew soon learnt to ignore him. He was so impressed by the boats: not by their quantity, but by their quality. Many interesting old yachts, several really wacky contemporary race boats (like the sports boat modelled on a Moth), rockstars like Investec whatsit who won the Sydney Hobart the following week. The Solent would have been as crowded, but with many more identikit Bendytoys and Bavarois.

Antares is kept in first rate order by Keessen and Owen – even among such glittering company she holds her head high.

With no tides to worry about the race,over an interesting course, was a matter of clear air, trimming, and picking the shifts. Fran got to trim the kite.

Fran trimming with an owner under each arm

Cherub, one of the queens of the SASC

We’ll be back in Sydney again, on our own bottom eventually in fulfilment of an old promise. For the meantime we’re very grateful to Rob and Dennis, great sailors and lovely people, for a wonderful day out, and we hope we can reciprocate one day.

Betty Alan’s going to have to work for her living, and in the winter months is going to be a London flat, in Limehouse Basin, between Canary Wharf and Tower Bridge.

The basin, where the Lee Navigation meets the Regents Canal (which in turn joins the Grand Union Canal that connected the Midlands and London) and where both debouch into the Thames, once heaved with real things being moved around the world in the great contractions of Empire. It is now between the two hubs of the new Britain, where the only things that move are digits and money. We see the lights blazing all night in the towers of Canary Wharf: have any buildings of that size ever appeared so temporary? There is an insubstantialness to the whole place.

Our end of the basin is a colony of narrow boat dwellers – a population that embodies the essence of adjacency – providing an attractive contrast to the dystopian world populated entirely by ambitious young accountants in over designed apartments. The actual East End continues, just 100 metres away, the other side of the A13, behind the riverside fringe of prosperity that’s as thin as the veneers on their temples at Canary Wharf.

Very Burnham scene, as the party wraps up

The mizzen was pulled out to have a new bit scarfed in at the foot by Priors, to address some rot – this was about the only defect the surveyor found – and after a small party for friends on the end of their pontoon we headed off down the Crouch, first right, and up the Thames for winter.

Dawn in the Whitaker channel

Starting before dawn, the first challenge was finding Dan Tribe’s TRAIGH, on her mooring. A blessedly short lived but quite dense fog patch made it difficult, but they conned us in, and we picked up the rest of the crew. Surprising, we made 12 in the end, but she never felt crowded.

Ed lashing down the tack of the mainmast topsail

Motoring most of the way to make it on one tide, we had a nice hour of topsail sailing in the East Swin, and got to Limehouse dead on time, at 1600. It’s an act of faith to get in there – you have to aim at a gap between the flats, which is almost invisible when you’re coming from downstream.

Dan Tribe looking characteristically suave in Limehouse

What strange new world is this?

On Saturday October 1 2011 at about noon we motored over the tail of the Swallowtail and switched off the engine, unfurled headsails, hoisted topsails, and began to sail the last leg of our delivery of Betty Alan from Lymington.

With barely steerage way at first we came up the river, the breeze finally building so that we were doing the best part of six knots over the ground. The breeze just hung on, and we reached Burnham under sail at the very moment of high tide.

The town can never have looked better, with a big tide filling the river and the scene flooded in miraculous October sunshine and the temperature only just short of 30 degrees in new money. Priors Boatyard was having their annual mini-regatta and had the bunting out: Robin and his family came out to welcome us in their launch. All was as well with the world as it ever can have been.

Later that afternoon, at her mooring. Photo by Chris Roberts.

We’d always meant to buy a more substantial boat in a few years time, but Betty Alan came right out of the blue. Something of a coup de foudre. We’d not even thought about a gaff rigged boat, and I’d imagined one of those beautiful retired 60′s racing boats – a Holman by choice.

After many weeks of negotiating (with our hearts as well as the vendor), surveying, and commissioning, we embarked on the last step of the sea-trial. Jeremy Lines came as well – see the section for the boat herself – and within minutes was up the mast like, well, like a designer up a ratpole.

No wind to speak of at the sea-trial, but no big bangs from the machinery; the mast stayed up; Jeremy found nothing nasty, and off we went to the bank, in a mood of fear and anticipation. Jeremy remained to weigh the boat, using nothing more than a tape measure to measure the freeboard, something I’d read about, without really believing.

It was done. Ours. What a great adventure awaits: trepidation and disbelief stalks the decks .