With a heavy heart, I’ve decided to give up my beloved Hamble River
mooring.
This has been an incredible
privilege – a little spot all my own in this beautiful place, an ancient center of ship-building and yachting. My
mooring is far up the river near the famous Jolly Sailor pub, which dates from the 17th century, and almost on the very spot where Admiral Nelson’s flagship (Battle of Copenhagen) the Elephant was built. The bones of Henry V’s flagship, Grace Dieu, built in 1418, lie near here, and can still be seen on a very low spring tide.
The
water is brackish up here, and so there is little fouling, which allows me to go three or four months between bottom scrubs. On top of all of it, I share my pontoon with the best neighbor in the world, a most lovely guy whose
boat, one of Kim Holman’s last designs, is one of the most beautiful on the river.
The waiting list for a Hamble mooring runs about 20 years, and those lucky enough to get through it, are granted this wonderful
privilege for life. As a Hamble mooring holder, you pay annual harbour dues and a small rent for your piece of the river bottom to the Royal Estate (as the Queen owns all the estuaries in the UK except Beaulieu). It amounts to about $2000 a year, which is about 1/10 of what a marina berth costs on the Hamble for this size
boat.
For someone living and working in or around London (Berkeley Square is just 90 minutes away by car), sailing on weekends and holidays, and/or cruising the South Coast in summer, this is an ideal setup. As a lovely bonus, if you come down for a weekend, say, and don’t feel like going out, being on your mooring is NOT like being in a marina. It’s like being at
anchor somewhere, so you feel like you’re already out somewhere.
But there are a few serious drawbacks. First of all, you have to a place on shore to land your
dinghy or harbor
tender. There are a couple of public hards where you can launch but are technically not supposed to leave a
dinghy permanently, but a few people do. Otherwise, you have to rent a dinghy berth at one of the
marinas. This costs about $900 per year and makes you a “citizen” of the marina – meaning you can use the
laundry rooms, showers, etc., and you can park there. That’s not a bad deal if you’re using it year round.
Then, you have to have something to use as a harbor
tender. If you use your normal dinghy, you will wear it out pretty fast with this duty. Plus it ends up staying in the
water most of the time, and the bottom will foul. I have a small hard rowboat which I pull up onto my pontoon when I’m not using it, but it is not very good, and so I end up using the normal dinghy, and wearing it out.
Then, there’s no
electrical power or water. No problem for the guy coming down from London for the weekend, but if you live on the boat for extended periods as I do, it means that you have to generate
electrical power and make heat. 5 hours of
generator use a day adds up – that’s 150 hours if you were to do it for a solid month, which is about $300 in
fuel alone, plus one
oil change and
service. Bleh. Plus the Eberspacher
heater which needs
service every x number of hours of use, plus more
fuel use. Of course I don’t do it for a month solid at a time – I’m flying around
Europe on business half the time, and when I’m on the boat I go out. But that’s yet another expense – instead of going out and being at
anchor all the time, like I like, I will spend one or two nights in some marina getting a good charge on my
batteries, hauling groceries, etc. On summer rates (April through October), that’s at least 45 and up to 75 pounds a night.
This stops making sense completely in the coldest months (December through February), so I have always spent these months in Cowes hooked up to electricity. This has worked out well as I have all my boatyard
work done there anyway. But it’s yet another expense, and when you add all of it up, it’s not that far off the $20,000 a year I would have been paying in a Hamble marina, and a lot of trouble.
The last three years, I have been out cruising four months a year anyway – May through August. That means I have only used my mooring for a couple of months in the fall, and at most one month in the spring (and usually zero). I’ve been subletting my mooring during the summer to a friend, but the Queen gets the profit, I only get a small rebate of my
fees. He’s been using my dinghy berth, using it far more than I, but not participating in the expense.
It just doesn’t make sense. So I’m giving up the mooring and will make Cowes my permanent base. The good news is that I can pay a waiting list fee in Hamble and maintain my original (from 5 years ago) place on the waiting list, which means I can get it back, or another mooring, pretty much whenever I want, should my circumstances change.
When I think about Cowes, my spirit is lifted again. I love this place! The Hamble is gorgeous, but the marina of which I was a citizen has, since the demise of the Moody boatyard, gradually become a center of giant
motor yachts and has become an increasingly alien place culturally. I feel out of place walking through it in my oil-stained
work clothes, amongst the Princess yacht owners in their canary yellow pants. Cowes, on the contrary, is jam packed with sweaty racers during the summer – Cowes being, of course, the world’s epicenter of sail
racing. And in the winter time is full of quirky Caulkheads, who speak more slowly and gently than the “Overners” (mainlanders) from the other side of the Solent. And do not wear canary yellow pants or shiny shoes. Rather than gourmet gastro-pubs (like the one I got
food poisoning in in Hamble Village last year), Cowes is full of sleazy sailor dives. The yacht haven is at the ancient town quay in the center of West Cowes, so three minutes walk from two good grocery stores, an absolutely awesome 19th century style ironmongers, an excellent old fashioned chandler (Jolliffes
Offshore Chandlers, est. 1853), and a multitude of other infrastructure. London is two hours door to door by public transportation via the high speed cat
ferry to
Southampton.
The yacht haven itself is quite unlike the giant boat parking lots on the mainland. The floating part is small (the hardstanding, however, is huge). Tall ships and naval vessels berth on the outside of the breakwater. The staff are the most friendly and helpful I’ve ever encountered in a marina, and it’s all the same people who were there 5 years ago – apparently zero staff turnover, unlike in the mainland
marinas
I'm even tempted to try to get into the RORC, which has now merged with the Royal Corinthian. This would give me the advantage of having a club in London, and the fellowship in Cowes must be pretty interesting, too. On the other hand, why put down roots anywhere? One of the best things about cruising is the constantly changing scenery. Have to think about that one.
Linear Mode
Recent Discussions