A Mirror on the Cuckmere
Is there any other small boat that has done so much to bring newcomers of all ages to sailing? When Jack Holt and Barry Bucknell created the first stitch-and-glue sailing dinghy for home-building, among a great body of other work, they had no idea just how big this one was going to be. More than 70,000 boats later, spread across every corner of the earth, the sailing world is today choc-full of yachtsmen who started their racing – and their cruising – aboard this little gem. Dan Houston was one of them
Mathieu, let’s leave out his surname, with his face pressed hard against the bottom boards, was crying out in French for his mother, for some sanity and for an end to his current predicament. ‘Bail, Mathieu, bail! We’ll get there quicker if the boat has less water in her because we’ll be lighter!’ These entreaties from the two of us,
hiked out to windward with our feet hooked under the black webbing toe- straps to stop us falling overboard, had little or no effect. If anything they seemed to strengthen his resolve to be as absent from the situation as possible. ‘Ah non, non, non-non-non! C’est
impossible! Land… I must land… please!’ Poor Mathieu, how was he going to report
40 SEAHORSE
this to his mum… or dad; from their Paris home they’d entrusted him to us on a school exchange to learn some English and ‘to have a good time’. In reality there wasn’t room for a lot of
water in the little boat, which was packed out with our camping gear, and in the rolling seas it was slopping out almost as much as it was coming in. But we were in a position of danger. There was too much wind, we were in big seas and we were under the cliffs between the mouth of the River Cuckmere and Seaford on the for- bidding Sussex coast. Earlier that morning we’d packed up our
little camp just north of Alfriston and had come down the Cuckmere on the top of the falling tide, shooting out to sea in high spirits thinking it was ideal sailing weather. The wind was blowing from the southwest as it usually did and the passage along that little bit of coast was basically due west. Even so, in order to be able to sail 45° to the wind, we’d had to head out to sea. We’d instinctively felt safer in the slightly
deeper water, where the waves were still breaking but they weren’t curling over us or pushing us back as much. However, going away from the beach in the boisterous seas had made Mathieu more anxious. He’d implored us to go back and drop him off so he could walk along the cliff path, which might have been a good idea, but we could- n’t consider it now. There were boulders
and large stones on the beach at Cuckmere and we could damage the boat sailing onto it with the wind behind us like this. Quite soon we’d done the worst bit,
which was getting west of Hope Gap, where the cliff angles in towards the entrance of the Cuckmere River, and we knew about the big boulders lying on the wave-cut platform which extends about 100 yards out from under the cliffs. If one of these waves lifted us up and plonked us down on a boulder like that the boat would shatter in a second and the three of us would be in the water, in a life-and-death situation. So we kept eyeing the cliff height above
us trying to work out the angle at which it meant we were getting too close to those dangers. My older brother as always was ahead of me on the maths. ‘You don’t need a tangent or cosine
table, what’s the height of the cliff here?’ ‘Is it 300ft? That’s what dad says, isn’t
it?’ ‘Yeah, and the rocky layer goes out
about the same, yes?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied believing that I did know
this. ‘So it’s basically like an isosceles right-
angled triangle. What are the angles?’ I was trying to think, but nothing was
happening. ‘What’s the angle at the base of the cliff?
Come on!’ ‘Um, 90, yeah, a right angle, so 90°.’
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