If a visit to the London Boat Show last month
prompted you to think about sailing up the Thames,
here’s how one crew did it in a 1904 gaff cutter
STORY PAUL EEDLELONDON CALLING
ONBOARD
W
orking a 1904 gaff cutter to windward
up the narrowing, winding River Thames
to Tower Bridge took a day of total
concentration. Tack too soon, and we
would have to tack again before the next bend. Too late,
and we risked driving 15 tonnes of wood and lead into
the timbers of a quay or the mud of the river bottom.
“When we have all the sails up, we have to operate 27
ropes,” skipper and owner of Aeolus, Anthony Wheaton,
said afterwards. “Tacking up the Thames, there wasn’t
much time to do anything else. I don’t remember eating
or drinking because there was so much going on.”
Our rewards were a thrilling sail and the chance to
see London, as few of us ever do, from its tradesman’s
entrance: the wide, flat Thames estuary and the low
marshlands along the river’s eastern reaches where
container ships, tankers, bulk carriers and barges unload
to feed and power a city of 10 million people. And we
found out how to open Tower Bridge.
Anthony had been wanting to make the trip from the
Hamble to London for a long time. He bought Aeolus in
2008, but she was impossible to sail. Built in California
as a gentleman’s day-sailing yacht, 41ft (12.5m) on deck
but only 9ft (2.7m) in the beam, she had a vast mainsail
on a boom that stuck out 10ft (3.1m) behind the transom
and would not balance. But the late Ed Burnett revised
the sailplan with a shorter boom and produced a boat
which sails beautifully: as soon as she feels the breeze on
her bow, she heels over 30 degrees and the helm can keep
her in the groove with fingertips. Anthony renewed the
rigging in keeping with an Edwardian boat: tan running
rigging, belaying pins, deadeyes and blocks and tackles.
Aeolus was sailing again, but was not equipped for
even a one-night passage. Anthony spent evenings and
weekends for seven years building an interior, piece by
piece, at home in London. He mocked up each item of
furniture in plywood to test for size and placement, then
created the finished article in varnished mahogany.
By the spring of 2015, Aeolus had eight berths, a
heads, a galley with a brass hand pump, and a chart
table with a cabinet of individual flag lockers.Even then, the trip almost faltered. In early summer,
beating into a choppy sea, the bowsprit broke. A single,
deafening crack stunned all of us on board. The jib poured
out to leeward and 8ft (2.4m) of shattered bowsprit
dragged in the sea, tied to the boat by a tangle of cables.
The next day, Anthony left Hamble town quay in his
battered estate car with several large tins of epoxy and a
roll of glassfibre matting in the boot, a broken bowsprit
lashed to the roof and a determined look in his eye, and
vanished into the London-bound traffic. Two weeks later,
Aeolus completed the Round the Island race with the
bowsprit looking nearly as good as new.
On the last day of July, we set out for London with
a crew of seven. The full moon hung huge behind the
boat as we sailed out of the Solent in a westerly
breeze. The next day we made the white cliffs of
Beachy Head in sparkling sunshine, and by midnight
we were spotting the lights marking the channel
inside the Goodwin Sands.
Our ancestors knew the sheltered waters off Deal as
an anchorage called the Downs. Before the invention of
steam engines made tides less relevant, this was where
ships waited for the right wind and tide to make the turn
around the tip of Kent into the Thames estuary. The
confluence of tides creates a gate of little more than two
hours when the stream is running north through the
Strait of Dover and west up the estuary.
“A hundred years ago, they came up on the flood and
went out on the ebb,” Anthony said. “On a modern boat,
nobody uses ‘flood’ and ‘ebb’. My boat has incredible
water resistance because it is a barn door under the water,
so it is critical that we sail with the tide.”
The old sailing ships would have anchored in the
Downs and picked up a pilot, if they had not already
taken one on board off Dungeness. However, we took
the chance of a few hours’ rest and a 21st-century
shower inside the harbour walls at Ramsgate.
We set off at mid-morning to catch the tidal gate,
pausing only to practise our MOB procedure when the
skipper dropped his bowler hat in the outer harbour.
Heading north in a light easterly, we reached into the