Destination: London

DESTINATION LONDON

I left on the 25th of August for an ambitious sailing trip: to sail from Zeebrugge to London!  Our friend Gediminas has sailed all his life, and I’ve written before about various trips that we have taken together.  A couple of years ago we tried to make the trip to London on Tyfoon but because of heavy seas and some motion sickness that struck part of the crew we opted instead to go to Calais and from there to Dover.  But I had made it clear to Gediminas that I was interested in trying again, and we were determined to succeed this time!  Three other Lithuanian sailors (Žydrunas, Gintaras and Marius) came along, and after we had loaded up all of the provisions and stowed all of our gear, we departed from Zeebrugge in the afternoon, and sailed a short first leg of the journey into Nieuwpoort in the evening to meet Frank, the skipper of Tyfoon.

We were awarded with a truly tremendous sunset that first night.  I was blown away by how yellow the sky became... Bruce and Maggie and the boys and I saw the Turner exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum last December, and saw how often he used yellow in his sea pictures.  Now I know why...

We stayed on board in Nieuwpoort until the night tide, and waited for our skipper Frank to arrive.  After plotting our course, we sailed for England… 

Coming out of Nieuwpoort there was some, but not too much wind, so it was easy going at first.  With six on the boat we fell into a pretty easy rotation of two or three people sailing and the others resting in shifts, for four to six hours each.  The weather was lovely...

From our departure in the early hours of the morning it took us that entire first day and a night to make it to London, crossing first to Margate, and from there into the Thames estuary.  Then it was a matter of about seventy nautical miles to travel up the Thames, through the flood barrier near the O2 arena, and up to the famous Tower Bridge, where we moored at the Saint Katharine Docks for the night.  What a beautiful location!

The next morning Žydrunas and I went out for a short half-hour run around the local neighbourhood.  Maggie and I stayed in London two summers ago for a holiday of several days in the apartment of our friend Deborah, so I remembered the area pretty well.  We ran from the Saint Katharine Docks along the north shore of the Thames to the Millennium Bridge, then across it and back east to the Tower Bridge and home.

Then Marius and Gintaras went off to get their hair cut (I’m not sure why, but hey, they had planned for it and had a reservation) and the rest of us did the tour of the Tower Bridge.  It is quite an engineering marvel, made of ironwork and structural steel clad in stone; I couldn’t help but think that my late grandfather (an ironworker who helped build many a bridge) would have loved seeing it.  Here's the view from the elevated glass-floor walkway... by way of the mirrored ceiling for easy self-portraits...

As Maggie and I did the last time we were staying in London, I signed up for the bike rental service, and Gediminas and I toured a few vintage record shops in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.  This part of London has a diverse multicultural population, and on a bike you see a lot of different ethnic costumes, hear a lot of languages smell a lot of different foods cooking as you cycle by at street level.

Of the two shops we visited, LoveVinyl is mostly dance and funk and rhythm & blues, and priced rather highly, but Flashback records has a ton of classic rock and jazz discs, of varying quality but at more reasonable prices.  I found quite a few discs for the collection, including an extremely funky record by the Muscle Shoals Horns, Louis Jordan, J.J. Cale, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and others.

That evening we had a dinner reservation at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Barbecoa, right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Marius had arranged a large car for us all from Über, and when it arrived, we all piled in.  It turned out that the driver was Bulgarian, and so he and the Lithuanians traded a few jokes in Russian, their closest common language.  It came to my mind how improbable this turn of events was: as a teenager in my home town in Canada, I could never predicted that one day I would pursue an opera career in Brussels, and for fun, would sail from Belgium to London with the Lithuanian ambassador, and laugh along with Russian jokes told by a Bulgarian driver while en route to a world famous chef's restaurant… I think that I can say reliably that the particular chain of events just described is not usually part of the long term plan when you are meeting with your eleventh-grade guidance counsellor at Moira Secondary School…

Jamie Oliver’s restaurant was nice; to our surprise, our server turned out to be Lithuanian, and the restaurant manager was a Canadian!  The meal was quite enjoyable, and we had a good time there, but didn’t stay out later after dinner, instead returning to the boat for a nice cigar to close out the evening.

It would have been great to stay longer in London, but we wanted to make sure that we would make it back to Zeebrugge on time, and so we sailed out fairly early that next morning.  I had been asleep when we had arrived in London, so was very interested to see the sights this time as we passed downstream on our way down the Thames to the sea.

A few notable sights on our trip back included Canary Wharf, and the many warehouses that have now been converted to apartments.

The famous Cutty Sark tea clipper was visible, moored on the southern bank of the Thames; a paticularly imposing structure is the Royal Naval College with paired domed towers and a large quadrangle that opens to the river.

The Thames meanders a lot in this section, and passes close to the Greenwich observatory; in the space of a few kilometres of river we passed back and forth across the Prime Meridian several times (It’s ok, I didn’t feel a thing).

Then we turned round the point that holds the O2 Arena, a visually interesting structure that looks like a steampunk sea urchin, and continued past the city airport with its cable car that crosses the river, and then onwards past lots of new office towers and out to sea.  There is a ton of construction going on in that part of London, and there are cranes visible everywhere.

As we continued down the river, the buildings eventually gave way again to more widely separated industrial and agricultural buildings, and the weather started to clear, so that we had some fantastic cloud formations.

As we emerged in the open sea again, we passed the Maunsell forts that hold several positions in the estuary… these are block-like buildings on stilts, and look like something from War of the Worlds or John Christopher's Tripods trilogy… they were built during the Second World War and made up part of the UK anti-aircraft defence.  Each of the three circular installations in the Thames estuary held six large guns and in total were responsible for shooting down 22 aircraft and about 30 V-1 flying bombs.  They were decommissioned by the Ministry of Defence in the late 1950s, but some were used as sites for broadcasting pirate radio, while others are still inhabited.

The light at sea is remarkably changeable… sometimes the sky was a steely grey, then deep blue, then clear with dazzling clouds, then sometimes yellow or purple or orange, as I described earlier.  The water also changes quickly, from a clear green colour to muddy blue, then sometimes dark grey, like stone… here are some more pictures of the trip back...

The wind was with us, and was remarkably steady both in strength and direction, so we made excellent time to Nieuwport; I think it was less than eighteen hours’ sailing.  The night sailing was great; I think I prefer it to day sailing, as long as one has clear skies… it’s sometimes hard to spot the navigation buoys during the daytime, but is far more easy to pick a star at the right compass heading and use it as your guide.

That’s about all there is to tell… we dropped Frank in Nieuwpoort and sailed home to Zeebrugge, docked the boat, cleaned it up, and said our goodbyes, then headed home, almost a day ahead of schedule.  But on the way home Gediminas and I stopped in Knokke for a quick swim in the ocean… fortunately there was a lifeguarding crew on hand to make sure that we were both ok…