West Mersea Town Regatta 2010

The West Mersea Town Regatta  has been running since 1838 and forms a wonderfully festive end to Mersea Week .  This year, as always, there were sailing races in the morning for smacks, yachts, dinghies and open fishermen's boats, with up to 150 boats taking part, so it was quite a spectacle.
I didn't go out sailing that day - I had relatives arriving during the morning and the races start very early - but the TM and crew, Richard and John, put up a magnificent show in Black Diamond, winning the Fast Classics race with style.  Sailing photos below are by Leafy, who was out with her camera, racing on her family's beautiful boat, Ivy Green.

Once the racing crews were ashore, it was time for the immensely popular water sports  - an entertaining range of fun rowing races for all ages as well as the famous 'greasy pole' competition.

In previous years there has always been a bit of a lull immediately after the watersports, when people tend to drift off home, but this time there was a new event, 'Song & Dance' - brainchild of Regatta Commodore Chrissie Westgate - to keep the waterfront buzzing. Two and a half hours of shanty singing, ceilidh dancing and live bands, with hot and cold food and a bar.

It was all great fun, very family-friendly, and well worth all the hard work before, during and afterwards. There were real live eighteenth-century Pirates on parade and joining in the dancing, too!  After the day's prizegiving ceremony, the Regatta ended in the usual way with the magnificent Grand Firework Display, which half the island (or so it seemed) turned out to enjoy.

(The images on the poster I put together to publicise the Song & Dance (below), are by island artist and doyen of the greasy-pole, Leafy Dumas, whose lovely website and blog you can find here.)

These are a few representative pictures. Lots more can be found on the Town Regatta website and on the Mersea Session blog.

My Mersea Week IV - Shanty Night

To celebrate the spirit of Mersea Week, the Coast Inn Acoustic Session held a special nautically themed night on Thursday 12th August.

We advertised it as 'Shanty Night' - and traditional seafaring tunes certainly played a large part in the evening's musicmaking - but all kinds of songs inspired by the sea (some with a fairly tenuous link) appeared - from The Drunken Sailor (twice!), to Row Your Boat (played by IM on the piano - the evening's youngest performer and witness to my lax parenting standards), to Yellow Submarine (at which point, as if from nowhere, a fantastic visiting trumpeter appeared at the window and inserted the solo twiddly bits with considerable panache, which brought the house down).

A couple of hours before kick-off, we made the executive decision NOT to hold the event outdoors - despite the gorgeous late sunshine and a holding-off of the forecast rain, there was a stiff breeze blowing straight into the garden of the Coast Inn, which would have dispersed the sound and made conditions too chilly for drinkers. So we held it in the bar as usual, which made for a packed-out night, but it all added to the atmosphere. A record number of musicians and singers turned up, plus all the regular punters and plenty of visitors (including lovely fellow-Mersea Blogger Teresa, aka Tarviragus, although unfortunately the occasion did not lend itself to much in the way of quiet chatting).

Next morning, the general consensus on the island was that Shanty Night had been a Jolly Good Thing, which should certainly be repeated next year. So perhaps we've started a grand new tradition for Mersea Week - it would be rather nice to think so.

Here are a few grainy pics (I don't like using flash - it's too distracting for performers): lots more can be found on the Mersea Session Website. As explained there, the bar was so crowded that I ended up trapped, standing on a table, by the fireplace, camera in one hand, tambourine in the other, glass of Guinness balanced precariously above me - hence the unvarying viewpoint of these photos.

My Mersea Week III - Round the Island Race

The Round the Island Race, for dinghies and small multi-hulls always takes place on the Wednesday of Mersea Week, weather permitting. There is a time-limit, but within that, entrants have to decide in advance what time they wish to start, and which way around the island they intend to sail.

With one of the least racy boats in existence - the 8ft 'Sea Pig', a rotund little lug rig, Mersea-built, wooden dinghy - the TM had a bit of a job on his hands getting all the way round the island in less than 24 hours, let alone the 6 or therabouts allowed. He opted (contrary to prevailing opinion amongst the rest of the fleet) to make the attempt in a clockwise direction.


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This meant heading up Strood Channel from the starting line, opposite the West Mersea Yacht Club. I set off on foot, along the sea wall with IM and the dog, fully confident that we would be able to keep pace and assist in the really exciting bit of the day - carrying the boat across the Strood. In fact, he streaked ahead, and the little tan sail can only just be seen in these pics. H and his friends were waiting at the Strood, in radio contact, to do the heavy lifting bit. (Below, you can just make out the Sea Pig, left of centre, having been launched into the water the other side of the Strood.)

At the end of the sea wall path, I handed IM over to a friend, who whisked her away by car, leaving me to trek the couple of miles back to West Mersea with the by then rather exhausted dog (it was a very hot day) and pick up my trusty bike (which is not a mountain bike but a sedate 1964-vintage Triumph with a basket on the front, so strictly for roads, not sea walls).

Whereupon I zoomed back down to the Strood to join the assembled throng in watching other boats being lifted across at high water and take a few pictures.

And thence to East Mersea to see if I could spot the Sea Pig emerging from the River Colne. After a longish wait - during which I retraced my tracks to the East Mersea Village Shop to buy an ice-cream, and then had a little post-snack snooze at Fen Farm - a small black dot with a red dot on top hoved into view at the extremity of my camera's zoom facility, and I watched as it tacked its way, painfully slowly, as it seemed, towards the beach. 

The wind had all but disappeared. And sporting a sail the size of a tea-towel atop a boat as hydrodynamic as a washing-up bowl, is not the best  method of harnessing every last bit of available wind-power. So, just off Fen Farm, out came the oars, and Sea Pig's skipper, mindful of bending every rule of the race well beyond breaking point, rowed his vessel the remaining 5 miles home.

And still missed the cut-off time by 15 minutes!

Oh well. Still a better result than last year. Luckily, it was all hugely enjoyable, if a little tiring (for followers as well as for rowers).