Ebb Tide

Ebb Tide went from being a river cruiser on the Severn to a blue voyager. I wish I had been around to give him a hand on the superstructure design.

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine and is the latest edition of Foul Bottoms with John Quirk exploring one family’s decades-long refit and unlikely bluewater voyage aboard their converted Admiralty launch, Ebb Tide.

You may remember an earlier article mentioned some snooty old biddy at the London Boat Show who said that one would only need a motor cruiser if one were contemplating joining the Birmingham Navy. I then told you of one member who bought a 42-foot ex-RAF launch on the East Coast, took her via canals and the Welsh Coast to the Severn where he kept her for 53 years. In the canal crossing, the crankshaft on one of the seven litre Perkins 120 HP diesels failed, so they herniated the engine on its side, removed the crank and caught a bus to Birmingham where it was reground and slipped back in again.

Just like that.

I have been looking over the years for the book, Ebb Tide by B. H. Le Pine-Williams, to tell you details of another member of the fleet. It arrived from the UK in a few days for $16.50 including postage. A brilliant bargain.

Basil and his wife Anne met when she nursed him as a pilot in hospital in WW2. They had six children and a large golden retriever. To enjoy family holidays without booking out half a hotel, they bought a 30-foot double-diagonal teak ex-ship’s lifeboat. They lived in Cheshire but kept the boat on the Severn, 90 miles away. As you might guess, they soon started looking for something bigger. The owner of a converted 52-foot harbour launch directed them to look for a similar craft. They were all built to exacting Admiralty specifications at taxpayers’ expense. After chasing around the country as far as Scotland and the Isle of Man, they found Ebb Tide. She was across on the opposite bank of the river. Basil was an electrical and mechanical engineer who ran a steel fabricating business which will explain how he managed to do such a prodigious amount of skilled work over the next 22 years.

Refit

Ebb Tide was in run down shabby condition. All that was usable was the teak hull, side decks, engine and stern tube. She came with a very used Gardner diesel. Wonderful, I hear you cry. Not really, this one was pried out of a 1936 Glasgow bus and mated with the gearbox from a 500 HP Packard from a US MTB. Not a happy union. In 1961, this was swapped for a Gray Marine 6-71, similar to Elgeria‘s engines from last month. Just one of the 1.5 million GM is reported to have made. Then, in 1964 this was swapped for a four cylinder GM engine with a 3-to-1 reduction which meant changing the prop. In 1970, a friend offered Basil a GM 4/71 so of course he had to have that. It came with a turbocharger which he removed. This proved very economical and with the extra tanks they kept adding gave them a range of 6,000 miles at 4½ knots and 1,800 at 9½.

An alternator was created by removing a three cylinder Perkins from a scrapped mobile crane and converting it. See what I mean about his abilities?

Family holidays began by exploring the delights of the Bristol Channel, then further afield round to Cornwall, the South Coast and Channel Islands. I became quite nostalgic reading about the places we enjoyed in my dad’s boat in the early 1960s.

His log is a basic factual report studded with little incidents, like when the gearbox seized up in the Bristol Channel, so he had to remove the top and hold it in forward gear manually. Then a water pipe blew out and had to be held in by hand. On their way to Jersey, the stern tube leak coincided with the failed bilge pump, so 250 gallons were removed by buckets. Basil seemed to have numerous problems with blocked fuel filters. This happened to us and we thought that filling up with duty free diesel in Alderney may have been a mistake. But he soon got a taste for it. It is hard to suck out a blocked pipe without inevitably gargling some of it. Equals instant sea sickness.

Bluewater

He reckoned that he and Anne logged 50,000 hours working on Ebb Tide over a dozen years. It is said that with a 40 hour week you actually work about 2,080 hours a year. The plans offered for Laurent Giles’ 46-foot gaff cutter Dyarchy say brace yourself for 8,500 man hours. Four years of hard labour. So they probably could have built a few new Ebb Tides with all the work they put into her.

They cruised summer and winter, clocking 3,810 miles in one year alone. All the time fixing echo sounders, radar, depth finders, radios, deep freezers, steering, gear, replacing the three inch thick transom and all manner of pumps, plumbing and electrical challenges. Basil thought he had a loose flywheel in France, so while the boat was at anchor, he just popped the engine on its ear, dropped the sump and found a broken crankshaft. A new one was flown out, brought out by dinghy but they couldn’t lift the engine sufficiently to install it. They borrowed a chain winch from the local lifeboat.

There used to be a European event called Pavillon d’Or held every two years which was a test of accurately projected passage times and the quality of log keeping. A member of the Severn based Birmingham Navy had won it once in a very nicely converted 65 foot air sea rescue launch. Ebb Tide entered three of these, won one, and best predicted passage and logbook in a second, and second overall in a third. And his younger daughter met her future husband on the Dutch yacht next door.

I left Kenya in 1973 and was watching the evening news on the family farm in North Devon when, like Mamma Mia, ‘I know that boat’. There was Ebb Tide being blessed by a cleric for her forthcoming voyage. To the Solomon Islands! Yes, they were off in their motorboat to do good work with a church group there. They originally planned to do the US Intracoastal Waterway but their church work directed them to the South Pacific.

Off the coast of France, the radio died and the engine made expensive noises, seized solid and also died. Their laundry line of steadying sails blew them to within 12 miles of the coast. Towing with the ten foot dinghy and outboard did not work so a volunteer ‘outboarded’ into the harbour and negotiated a tow. Engine out again and take it to bits. ‘Oh, it’s only a few teeth missing from the timing gears, nothing serious,’ said Basil. Or it could have readjusted the timing and the pistons and valves would have made disastrous contact. A new radio finally arrived and off they went, leapfrogging down the French and Iberian coasts to meet up with service agents for various bits of British made electrical equipment in the sixties. Then via the Canaries, Cape Verde they drank gin and played Scrabble across a ten day crossing of the Atlantic in winds F1 to F4. Nine hours through the Panama Canal which America finished and financed, after the French gave up, and one of the US Presidents later gave it away.

Then all downhill through The Galapagos, Marquesas, Samoa and the Solomons where they stayed until Independence in 1978, enjoying life living ashore and using Ebb Tide around the islands on church duties. The voyage from England took 76 days and over the 13,807 miles they used 4,852 gallons of fuel. That is about 2.84 mpg. Or the same as a Cadillac in heavy traffic during my days in the Big Apple.

The whole period of Ebb Tide‘s ownership is a tribute to the hands-on generation that could do stuff without asking ChatGPT. They were a breed apart, men and women who could read a voltage drop by the dimness of a cabin light. A basic electrical knowledge was essential in those days when nearly all of the stuff was made by The Prince of darkness (Lucas). And they could tune a carburettor by ear. The fifties and sixties gave us more than classic hull designs; they gave us a masterclass in self-reliance. Let’s not forget the power of raw, unfiltered mechanical and electrical instinct. When a screen went blank or a gearbox decided to go ahead and astern at the same time, it was the old-fashioned skills that got them home.

Or 13,807 miles to Tonga.

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine. To explore more stories like this, browse the AFLOAT Magazine archive or view the latest edition of AFLOAT Magazine.