


Before long, PJ was on a lorry headed for Brighton (cost: around £2,000) and I was beside myself with excitement. My desire to own her was immediate and overwhelming. I waited as the painfully slow dial-up connection revealed the pictures line by blurry line: a 1932 gentleman’s ketch. Shortly afterwards, my dad phoned with news of a beautiful boat, Pamela Jeanne, in the river in Dumbarton, at almost half our budget. We spent around £500 lifting her out of the water and appointing a surveyor. I was taken with Paranormal, a steel motorboat in Rochester that the owner, gesturing to a bent spoon framed on the wall, said had previously belonged to Uri Geller. Photograph: Will HutchinsonĪ year on, we set a budget of £50,000 to upsize and scoured the country viewing overpriced boats in terrible condition. Then up, into the mercurial mouth of the Thames, that timeless route followed by Julius Caesar in 54BC, Sir Francis Drake in 1580 and. North Foreland, sleepily familiar from the Shipping Forecast, made real. We hadn’t come far – out of Brighton marina, left along the coast, past Dover and the eerie spectre of the 100 rotating blades of Kent’s offshore windfarm. It was our first voyage on her, and though neither of us had a clue what we were doing (we were relying on an experienced friend), it felt good. This time, I had come on my boat, the 47ft wooden motorsailer that had been home to my partner Phil and me for a couple of years. Quite a contrast from my first arrival, 10 years earlier, as an impressionable 19-year-old, deposited off the Glasgow bus to the thrilling, screaming capital at night. Gazing ahead as we entered the Thames estuary, I made out the dorsal fin of a porpoise, gently rolling through silver waves.
