Entertainment afloat
In 1963 Charles Stock converted a 16ft 8in Fairey Falcon hull into a midget sailing cruiser, Shoal Waters. She was engineless and gaff-rigged and sailed 70,000 miles around the Thames Estuary over the next 35 years. ‘Don’t just sit there’, says Stock, ‘See something.’
Sailing is fun anyway. The sheer joy of a little ship wooing the winds to travel over the waves is reward enough in itself, but the small boat sailor on the restless waters of the Thames Estuary gets an almost unlimited bonus from the backcloth against which he sails. Hour by hour an enthralling panorama of fauna, flora, trade ancient and modern, relics of wars fought yesterday and a thousand years ago, maritime architecture from St Peter’s on
