Barton’s Pt ([wikipedia:Sheppey]) to Southend Pier, the defence boom & back. 13.7NM
Nick the Younger, Tony Roberts and Sean Foo.
With an acute inclination to spend the maximum time paddling and the minimum time driving I’ve been on the look out for interesting opportunities close to home. This is the latest.
While the Solent and Isle of Wight offer spectacular scenery with challenging tides and races, the seaward reaches of the Thames estuary are closer to home (40 miles) but still offer wide open spaces and the need for cross-tide planning but relatively little risk to life or limb.
The trip follows a triangular course, starting near Sheerness on the Isle of [wikipedia:Sheppey] crossing diagonally to Southend (the pier is a great landmark), turning east along the Essex coast to the end of an old anti-submarine boom and then back to the starting point.
As with many previous trips I planned a route and made initial calculations, which Tony then reviewed. His suggestions included setting out an hour later (at HW -5hr) to give more tide help and deeper water over the shallows of Southend’s extensive beach, and a minor route amendment to let us visit the ‘dangerous wreck’ of the S.S.Richard Montgomery, a WWII ship loaded with explosives. Both ideas were instantly adopted!
We met by Barton’s Point (at east end of concrete sea wall - unload boats on tapering tarmac by end of wall; parking over the road & possible camping?) and launched at 1345, HW -5. The forecast was ridiculously fine, hot, rather cloudy and with only F2 winds. Perfect for an initial assessment of the route without distracting factors. More challenging conditions would be welcome another time.
Instead of paddling along the coast I’m currently enjoying paddling out on a compass bearing, with my target visible but in a different direction; you just have to trust your calculations and the tide. This is what I need to get better at and Tony had set his new GPS to track our course so we could later compare where we’d actually been with where we’d planned to go. The Thames here is not a single uniform channel but comprises the main channel of varying depths with a branch off to the Swale and Medway. To make things more interesting there are two or three shipping lanes (the deeper sections), extensive shallows and plenty of buoyage and other marks that help with navigation. Tidal streams vary in speed and direction across the estuary. As a kayaker the tidal diamonds rarely provide quite the information you want and here is no exception – the art is blending the available information, including what you find on the day and filling in the gaps with some inspired guessing.
Before reaching the wreck, 1.5NM offshore, it we knew we were ahead of schedule, paddling at about four knots. That gave us ten minutes to inspect the wreck’s three masts, rough slanting crosses encrusted with mussels, encrusted with barnacles, with the tide swirling past at about a knot. The next leg was across to the pier, 4.3NM, and I doggedly stuck to my course despite it being clear that we were faster, and the tidal stream less than anticipated. After about three miles Tony asked us how deep we thought it was…then stuck his paddle in to reveal a depth of 1.5m – his GPS having told him we’d just reached the shallows that dry at low tide, a mile offshore. We headed to the beach away from the pier and its crowds and their banging music (audible two or three miles across the water). There was little apparent flow over the shallows and again we were ahead of schedule as we landed on the gently shelving beach of sand and shingle. It was 1516 hr, (HW -3:30)
After tea we simply followed the coast east, past terraces of colourful timber beach huts and through a flotilla of moored boats, each facing the gentle southerly breeze, until we reached the wooden jetty at Shoebury Ness. Twenty teenagers were standing at the end, watching each other taking running jumps. From this point the end of the anti-submarine boom was visible, a string of clustered concrete piles, and we simply aimed straight out for it.
To make navigation on the return crossing more interesting I’d planned to follow one course to an anchorage shown on the chart (over half way) and then to follow a new course back to Barton Point, our start, but now I realised that at the wreck we’d forgotten to look to see how the anchorages were marked on the sea and that from the journey so far they simply weren’t marked. Apart from dead reckoning we had no way of telling when we reached this crucial elbow so decided to follow a single bearing back to our start. I simply averaged the bearing of the two planned courses and we headed homewards on 185 degrees.
The sea was flat and at one point splashes of water started popping out of the glassy calm. We stopped paddling to see what was going on and found ourselves in a shoal of silver fry, throwing themselves into the air in an attempt to escape the bass or mackerel that were driving them to the surface. Again we were way ahead of schedule and following our extemporised course found ourselves back very close to the wreck; too far west. Our course had been wrong and the tidal stream was clearly stronger than expected (we were ahead of time) and our faster paddling had only exagerated the inacuracies of my tidal information and plans. Tony’s GPS later revealed this graphically and when I reworked the calculations at home the new course seemed to be supported by what the GPS recorded.
At 1815 (HW -0:30) we landed carefully back at Barton’s Point amidst an angling competition.
The trip had been a success and is one I intend to repeat under different conditions. The tides were approaching neaps so could have been far more challenging – springs would have shown up the errors in my vector diagrams even more.
This could be an excellent club trip for those wanting to paddle a little further from the shore and to learn or practice some navigation…or simply to visit Southend and the longest pleasure pier in the world !
Photo to be added when Sean returns from N.Uist.