Our old boat

Wild Cat, aka Lewarne

We had a wonderful weekend with Ben and Kaz, completed by Edwin and Andre visiting to bring a couple of board games. An email had come unexpectedly from the new owner of our old boat, Lewarne. We had sold her in 2016 when she was renamed Wild Cat by her new owner, a great fan of Arthur Ransome. She is now berthed in Cardiff. The new owner, Jim Reeves, is a cheerful nineteen-year-old who has lived among boats all his life, and now his own Marine Service company. He mailed me a link to a video tour of our boat (Video of Wild Cat aka Lewarne), which brought back many wonderful days with friends and family cruising the Orwell and East Coast rivers. Such memories are so precious and made me revisit the old pictures we had of those days. 

Jim has added features like an electric toilet and a large screen projector TV, as well as building a double berth in the after cabin to replace the two narrow single berths, and sails her single-handed, intending to go to the Scilly Isles this summer. Lewarne is now almost 50 years old, still with most of her original woodwork; I wonder how well modern yachts will look in 50 years, even without the constant need to varnish and polish timbers. Designed for the Baltic fishing trade, she has a reassuringly thick hull with a wonderful shear that seemed to brush the most fearsome waves aside without fuss. Altogether a beautiful boat, though showing her age a little now.

We were last in Cardiff many years ago, to see an exhibition inspired by where they had filmed some of the Dr Who episodes. Jim invited us to visit and see the boat if we are ever in Cardiff, but I can't see us returning there, good though it would be to see the old boat again. I note she still has the funny patch in her foresail where it suddenly ripped while running in a good blow on the Stour; I never understood why the sail makers fitted a yellow patch! Perhaps it was their surreptitious protest because we didn't order a new sail from them.