Sea-Change:
Wivenhoe
Remembered
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Sailing
and Ecology
Seals:
fishermen versus sailing - Barry Green
The less said
about them, the better! You don’t get no fish. Yes, they take the
herrings out your nets, and they also take the soles out your nets when
you’re trawling. Their numbers are increasing because of just being
protected. There weren’t so much talking, in the old days, about it,
there was more action. There wasn’t so many sailors, was there, about?
There was only fishermen, or people doing commercial work. Now it’s the
other way around, isn’t it? There’s more people not earning a living,
and finding time to report people, and feel sorry for things, which
don’t really involve them, does it?
The river is much cleaner - Don Smith
The river is much cleaner now. It’s
gotten better. You see cormorants up here [to Wivenhoe] now. And a seal
comes up too. Years ago, there used to be a terrible discharge, all the
time, from the gasworks at Colchester, used to come down the river. But
you haven’t got that now. And you’ve no commercial craft coming up
now. Because you used to get oil, too, on the water, with the commercial
craft up here.
Sandpit to nature reserve
- Ray Hall
But the Second Beach, in those days,
they were still taking sand and ballast from it, and they had, on the end,
the elevator and grader, and I should think for at least a mile along the
beach, there were these little rail tracks which they had trucks on, so we
used to delight in pushing them along every weekend, because there was
nobody working there! That’s beyond Brightlingsea, on the Second Beach,
on the Colne Point. The elevator was there way into the Sixties. But then,
of course, that’s become a nature reserve now.
Just magical
- Tim Denham
I’ve always loved birds. And
sailing, you can get so close. When you’re at anchor, they’ll come and
perch on your boat. When you first see the terns – summer visitors –
dropping into the river all round you, catching little shrimps and sand
eels, it’s just a lovely sight. And then you get magical flocks flying
over. Even a bird as ordinary as the starling, they land and take off in
large numbers on the marshes, and they fly in formation – when one
turns, they all turn. Lots of the little shore birds – the ringed
plovers, the sanderlings, the dunlin - they all have this skill of flying
in fairly tight flocks and all turning at the same time, and one minute
you see them brown, and the next minute you see them white, as they flit
off in another direction, and somehow, it is just magical.
Some birds have disappeared a little.
There used to be lots of little sparrows on the marshes, and they’re not
so common now. I think the lack of commercial shipping has had an
influence on the river, and the bird that has reduced vastly in numbers is
the swan, because while the shipping was here, they were unloading grain
at Rowhedge and up at Colchester, so the spillage there was wonderful for
the swans.
We’ve got the most romantic of all
the geese on the Colne, the smallest goose in the world, and probably the
wildest one, the Brent Goose, which breeds in Spitzbergen and North
Russia, in Siberia, and it comes down here October time. Quite good to
eat, they tell me, if you soak them in boiling water for 24 hours before
you actually roast them! But I’ve not done it!
Cormorants were very very rare on the
river, in fact so rare that when the fishermen went away as yacht crews,
they came across them first in the Solent, standing on the end of the
groynes, with their wings up drying, they nicknamed them ‘Isle of Wight
Parsons,’ because of their black plumage and their white throat
breathing pads. But now, of course, there are over 500 pairs at Abberton,
and they’re a complete nuisance!
Of course, on the river the one that
I longed to see when I was little, was an avocet. The RSPB emblem is, of
course, the avocet. I never saw one on the River Colne. Now we’ve got
flocks of 450, and it’s just wonderful to see them. They fly like
butterflies, so elegant!
The birds
and the rain - Pat Ellis, Joyce Blackwood
Another nice thing that we do now, it
doesn’t take long, we sail down to Pyefleet, and if you wait until the
tide has gone a bit, and you can sail right up to the end of Pyefleet.
There were seven or eight seals up there. The fishermen don’t like them
very much, but we all think they’re very nice.
If you go on the water before high
tide, when the mud is exposed, that’s when you want to see all the
birds. And now, there are hundreds of avocet and dippers and egrets. And
herons. That’s really lovely when you’re down there. There’s Rat
Island as well, where the gulls all go, and we used to go on the island to
pick up gulls’ eggs. Of course, you’re not allowed to do it in any
more, but you’d get a bucket of gulls’ eggs, and they made beautiful
sponges! But when the tide is very very high, and it covers that island,
the gulls, the noise they make, as they’re wheeling about above it...
At night, I don’t sleep! That’s
why I can hear the birds! Oh, curlews, you hear them, and you hear the
oyster catchers, which squeak as they fly, and they seem to be on the go
all the time, the oyster catches. And you definitely hear the rain! Oh
God, yes, you hear the rain! You don’t hear much else. That’s one of
the nice things about sailing, if you’re not using a motor, and you’re
just sailing along, you might hear the swish, a bit of water swishing, but
there’s no other sound at all, that’s lovely. We try not to use the
engine when we’re down there, and it’s lovely!
The last
wilderness - Tim Denham
It’s the last bit of real
wilderness out there. When you’re out there, midweek, there’s nobody
else there, and you really are living life to the full, pitting yourself
against nature. And when the weather’s beautiful, it’s absolutely
heaven on earth, and when the weather’s awful, it’s very exhilarating,
very frightening, but very rewarding when you get safely back.
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