‘Buying a boat during the pandemic was the ultimate lockdown legacy’

A westerly wind is ripping through the foresail while sheets of grey fall from leaden clouds above. To starboard, a freight ferry seems to be careering towards us en route to the industrial docks of Harwich, and I’m suddenly aware that I can no longer make out the channel-marking red and green buoys – fingers of fog have descended and I neglected to put my contacts in this morning. 

So far, our first passage aboard Elle – the 32ft Hallberg-Rassy my partner Rich and I are tentatively moving from Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex to Woolverstone in Suffolk – is proving far from plain sailing.

But before I can start questioning the returns policy on our 30-year-old cruiser, a curious grey seal appears just off our bow, his mottled head bobbing up unexpectedly in the salty surf. Soon, another whisker-filled face breaks through the whitecaps. Then another. We watch as three silky sea dancers surface to say hello. And, just like that, I stop fighting the terror of our first sailing adventure and start enjoying it. Because this, I realise, is what I’ve signed up for: learning to embrace the rough with the smooth, one of nature’s most valuable lessons. We’ve all just stopped listening.

Allow me to backtrack for a minute, though: the idea of buying a boat was first seeded in 2012 when Rich and I travelled around Australia and New Zealand. Both adventure-hungry water junkies, we were drawn to the Whitsundays and found ourselves on a week-long island-hopping voyage aboard a beautiful, classic wooden ketch. Days at sea watching waves blur into sky and the sun dip over billowing sails triggered a yearning to buy our own vintage vessel. I had visions of us bareboating in Greece – one hand firmly on the tiller, the other gripping another zesty Tom Collins. Neither of us had ever sailed before, but that was a mere technicality. We’d just have to learn.

Once back in Blighty, Rich promptly booked himself onto a RYA Competent Crew course, picking up the basics during a five-day passage along the wide, meandering waters of the River Stour. Six years later, I somewhat sheepishly did the same. And then? Well, nothing. 

Oh, we talked about buying a boat; about finally setting sail for the Azores, and tacking our way through the Isles of Scilly, and navigating the rocky outcrops of Croatia before diving off the back for a sun-soaked swim. We talked about that a lot. But we didn’t do it. We didn’t even come close – life always seemed to get in the way. Until, of course, March 2020 rolled around and a global pandemic forced everything and everyone to stop being busy and start being still. Finally, with nowhere to go and no plans to keep, now was the perfect time to start sailing.

We drove down to the Solent and spent days wandering around old boat yards and moneyed marinas. We climbed aboard mid-size Moodys and snooped around snug Cornish Shrimpers. But when I spotted a teak-decked Hallberg-Rassy – the same boat we’d learned the ropes on during our Comp Crew courses – moored just 20 miles away from our home on the Essex/Suffolk border, we knew we’d found “the one”. Lockdown had left us weary of looking at four walls: now, the grey-green waters of the River Orwell promised freedom.

But while money can buy you a boat, it can’t buy you experience. Our first few trips out were hair-raising for all the wrong reasons. Moorings were heart-pounding events; reefings (reducing the sail) regularly went awry. But, slowly, we relaxed into the practicalities of owning our own vessel and, rather than fixating on our points of sail, we started noticing the everyday rhythms of the river, instead. 

Taking each day at nature’s pace, we watched the Suffolk sky slice itself into layers of red, purple and pink at dawn. We saw it shift into a ballet of swirling starlings and low-cruising Canadian geese come dusk, then explode into a celestial canopy at night, stars spread sporadically like crotchets and semi quavers across an inky blue jazz sheet.  

Now, as we approach the end of our second lockdown on the Orwell, we’ve come to know the sounds of the estuary, too. How it gurgles under swing moorings as we dip wedges of salty bread into balsamic, or slaps at the stern as we pass picturesque Pin Mill – its secluded sandy shoreline a nostalgic rendering of rural England. We can decipher between the shrill of a swift and trill of a swallow. But we’re still listening out for the “chuff” of Suffolk’s elusive harbour porpoises, who we’ve yet to spot but know journey somewhere off the coastline’s syrup-smooth ribbons of blue.  

Living out two lockdowns on the river has rewilded us and, despite its hardships and hostility, we have Covid-19 to thank for that. Without this pandemic-shaped pause on normal life, who knows when we would have taken the plunge. Perhaps never. 

But now, sailing is part of our souls. We know that being sandwiched somewhere between the sea, sails and sky makes us happier. And surely if there’s anything positive to take from this pandemic, it’s that.