One of the things I love about sailing is the way it puts you in touch with time. It is not just the way the tides and the seasons impose order on your life but it is contact with the lives of our ancestors who also used the seas, the rivers and the lakes.
I spent this summer sailing my 22 foot shallow draft (13 inches), canoe sterned gunter rigged Hunter Minstrel up all the primary estuaries of Eastern Scotland. In the early spring I was in the Firth of Forth and we rode the four knot tides the 60 miles inland to Stirling.
I had some incredible nights aground on the bird rich mud flats or at anchor on the bend near Stirling Bridge where William Wallace gave the English invaders their come uppance in 1297.
I could never know what it would have been like to have fought in a battle where grown men clonked heavy bits of iron around in an attempt to kill the bloke standing opposite them, but I could appreciate the skills of the boatmen and sailors who successfully delivered thousands of men, horses and battle paraphernalia to this spot using sails and the power of these 20 foot East Coast tides.
All along this coast there are harbours and castles built by people who have been dead for 600 years or more.
Close to almost every castle there will be a man made harbour or wharf that often outdates it by hundreds of years. Some of the harbours have twenty foot thick walls made of hand hewed blocks cut from the local 400 million year Old Red Sandstone. Theses little harbours are just as labour intensive to build and as impressive in their way as the castles but much, much more useful to ordinary blokes who take to the sea for a way of life.
We have spent many nights in these astonishing little harbours. On windy nights tied to the high walls by our 20 foot long bow and stern lines Katie L will surge gently backwards and forwards with the swell of the North Sea waves. The forward one I weight in the middle with the spare anchor to keep the boat steady through the change in water level. For 500 years blokes have been mooring small boats here. Getting it right is as much an art as a science.
I also took Katie L to Perth at the top of the navigable Tay which braids into six inch deep rivulets of peaty fresh water at low tide. Depth challenged deep keelers only get to see the first quarter of these rivers. Jill and I then spent two fabulous hot days drifting up and down the Earn which twists and turns through the astonishingly productive Scottish Lowland countryside with its mighty oaks and fields of malting barley that will be turned into the finest alcoholic drink yet devised by man.
I spent the late summer and the survivable part of the Scottish autumn in and around the Moray Firth which is the final East Coast estuary of my journey.
Almost four centuries ago the English brought their muskets, guns and red ranks of disciplined fighting men to Culloden where they gave the Scottish Clans such a thorough beating that an entire way of life was destroyed. The Clans were overwhelmed in a tidal wave of domination, progress and naked greed. The men and machines of war were brought here in vessels skilfully sailed by humble seafarers. They used the same man made harbours where Katie L shifted gently in the North sea swell.
The Southern shore of the Moray is a series of the most marvellous sand harbours that dry to a trickle of fresh water at low tide. They are places where you can let the boat settle aground and walk for miles across thousands of acres of water sculpted sand. Some of the harbours have 20 foot high wooden posts layed out in geometric patterns across the sand - placed there by my father's generation to deter German glider borne assault troops from using the low tide expanses as landing strips.
Within a few hours the crystal clear chilly waters of the extreme North Sea come trickling back in tinkling and sparkling in tiny streams that snake around the rippled sand surface and slowly fill the smooth sculptured dips and mounds until the boat is surrounded by an ever growing lake.
If you peer over the side of the boat and watch the incoming water you see the hermit crabs moving around like tiny tanks while the superfast translucent shrimps scuttle across the rippling sand surface. Jelly fish that have come straight off the drawing board of a deranged science fiction artist drift past the the hull while formation swimming shoals of sand eels come flashing through the water.
Eventually Katie L lifts and sighs across the sand to lie at anchor to the slowly building incoming stream. Then the seals start to appear. They swim under and around the boat using their whiskers to feel the strange oscillating slip streaming pressure wave created by the tide running across the rudder and twin keels. Eventually, encouraged by the deepening water they bob to the surface much closer to the boat and look at you through their dog like faces - looking for all the world like aquatic Labradors.
You can then lift the anchor and go for a sail to places you were walking over just a few short hours before.
Each incoming tide creates another tiny layer of sand which will eventually be crushed down by millions of years of time to become much the same sort of mile deep sandstone that make up the 300 foot cliffs of the North Shore of the Moray Firth. The uncounted sedimentary dip down for a mile or more through 400 million years of Earth history and remind you that eventually the story of humanity will amount to just a few millimetres of deeply buried rock.
Being a small boat sailor helps to put things into perspective. It tells me to sail more and make the most of the tiny slice of time that belongs to us.
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