By Gian Maria Negri Porzio
As many readers will be aware, the Clidive boats – Yellow and Blue – have a new winter home at Erith Yacht Club, 20 miles east of London and easily reached by car/club van. It has a shed full of any tool you might need for boat maintainance, and our Bosun and his crew have already taken advantage of them (thanks Phil and crew!). Facilities are state of the art, with a cozy clubhouse and hot showers to recover after a long day.
Launching the RIB is a piece of cake, if you know how (we didn’t the first time …): there is a yellow trailer that you can attach to our own and gently slip the boat into the Thames without getting the van’s feet wet. And that’s not all: the tap is next to the slip, so washing the boat down is nice and easy.
So, is there no downside to Erith YC? Can it be perfect? Well, all roses have their thorns: you can only launch and recover at HW +/-2hrs, and if you want to moor at the pontoon, the window is probably even smaller if you don’t want to go aground.
How do I know all this? Simply because on the second weekend of February I was at Erith with Jaka and Niovi for our Diver Cox’n assessment, under the scrupulous examination of Gillian. When she suggested taking it in February, we immediately accepted: we would both avoid losing a precious weekend during the diving season and also be available as additional cox’ns for diving trips.
The obvious downside was the weather. Saturday was sunny, but extremely cold! We simulated a very enjoyable dive trip on the Thames, shotting wrecks and deploying our diver ‘Bob the buoy’ under the Queen Elizabeth Bridge. He was quite naughty and clearly didn’t listen to the cox’n in charge, given that he kept falling overboard! He fell so many times that we missed the window to moor at the pontoon and we had to fall back on mooring to a buoy and rowing ashore.
On Sunday the weather was even worse, as it started raining early morning and only stopped once our day had finished. Even though we were completely soaked and the tidal streams were strong, we performed all our manoeuvers well: three-point turns, mooring, anchoring, high-speed figure of eight …
As we were now used to, Bob kept leaping into the water and having to be rescued at the most ‘difficult’ moments. In addition, it seemed he had a will of his own: one time, after we simulated dropping him on the shot, he swam to the shore and I had to walk with giant strides across the mud to recover him!
We concluded the day by washing Blue down and warming ourselves up at the bar in the clubhouse. There, after a final round of theory questions, Gillian officially signed off our new title in Clidive. So be aware – there are three new cox’ns ready to give you safety briefings and tell you to ‘do first, ask later’ during our dive trips.
Good luck to the next batch, who will take the exam at the end of March!
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