We were back on the Crouch estuary. This time on a hot summer's day.

There was a red ball of fire rising over the mudflats as we cast off at
6.37am. There is only enough water to float the boat for half an hour either
side of the tide at most, so we needed to get into the main channel and out
of the creek before it drained out again. Walter and I were fishing on our
own and borrowed Kev's old decommissioned coastal fishing boat.

Perfect sunrise

Lol, another local man waited for us and showed us the quickest and safest
route through the mudflats, before he steamed off out to sea to trawl for
Dover sole. We expected to locate the bass close into the upper estuary.

Lol's boat

Soon after anchoring near Foulness power station, Walter caught five baby
tope in quick succession. Things were looking good.
I got crabs and more crabs. And so it went on for the rest of the morning
and afternoon.

A baby tope is a fish after all, better than catching crabs all day.

After a couple of hours, we moved on to another mark near the mouth of the
Crouch and anchored over a deep hole.

In the wheelhouse, where four of us slept one stormy November night.

Alas, those five tope were the only fish caught all day. Listening
on the radio, we could hear all the other angling boats reporting on their catches
and being very coy about it. No one was catching more than one or two fish,
including the big angling charter boats.

It was glorious weather and we sat on the open deck in shorts, half dozing
in the lazy afternoon. Very few fish registered on the sonar, so after 7
hours we decided to move on to Potton Creek further up the river, fish there
for an hour and then make our way back to the berth on the tide.

  It really is the sunny Crouch, not the Zambezi.       

Soon after getting under way, I noticed water spraying from a hole in the
engine housing. We pulled the housing off and found the boat was full of
water, half way up the engine, in fact. It was impossible to see where the
water was getting in, there was so much spray being thrown up by the fly
wheel. Walter then switched on the bilge pump and to our disgust, the bloody
thing wouldn't work. It worked fine in the morning.

We quickly decided a course of action. Walter was going to steer us back,
keeping close to the mudflats and sandbanks while I bailed out with a two
gallon bucket. The idea was that if she looked like sinking, we would run
her onto the nearest bank and if it wasn't too soft, wait for rescue ashore.
We just had to hope the bank was high enough, as the tide was still rising
fast for another hour and a half.

I started bailing out the bows first and managed to get the water down a few
inches. Then Walter suggested I check the stern. There was at least 2 feet
of water there and no matter how hard I bailed I could only keep up with the
ingress of water.

Walter radioed Des, whom we knew was fishing somewhere near. He was tied up
on a buoy 3/4 of an hour away, so we headed towards him. Walter and I
swapped places after half an hour. Bailing in that heat was hard going. I
kept the boat close to shore, keeping just 4 to 8 feet of water below the
keel until we located Des. Tying up beside him, we cut the engine and all
three of us bailed hard for half an hour and just managed to make an impact.

We stopped then to see if we could spot where the leak was coming from.
There was a hole in the bow and another leak in the stern. Des thought the
stern gland might be leaking and got his grease gun. Feeling around in the
bilge water, he located the nipple and packed the gland with grease,
stopping the leak there.

Once we had that leak stopped, we continued to bail and got enough water out
to raise the hole in the bow above the waterline again. Lol came by then and
we followed close behind him back to the berth. We were a bit early and ran
aground on soft mud just 10 metres from the berth. Another 15 minutes passed
before the tide was high enough for us to take her right up the berth and
tie up.

Lol had done better than most, with a couple of dozen Dover sole, but he was trawling.

It's often a chain of events which lead to a problem. The stern gland was leaking, we
weren't really aware of it and we had no grease gun. Once the gland flooded
the boat enough, the hole in the bow went below the water line and started
to fill her up there too. Then the bilge pump stopped working and we had no
back up.

In the event, it was not a real predicament.The boat frequently spends weeks at berth, leaking from the gland and filling up to a point, but still does not sink. I wish we had known that at the time though.

The first job back home was a shower to get rid of that stinking bilge water.
We'll have to do that again sometime.