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 I

Just getting to grips with all the photos, at last.

Sunday 8th August. West Mersea Yacht Club. The TM's band, Blackwaterside, provided the afternoon's entertainment on the lawn after the sailing races in the Dabchicks Regatta, while children sat around chatting quietly over a drink and grown men played noisy games on bouncy inflatable things.