A strange occurrence

It was just an ordinary day in July, warm and sunny with a light north-westerly breeze. But I was totally unprepared for the experience I was about to have. In forty years of cruising on the east coast I thought I’d seen everything — until that day.

Bubbles, my newly acquired Skipper 17 and I had left West Mersea early in the morning, quietly taking the ebb down the Wallet for a weekend’s cruise. In these lightish winds I was trying to make the Backwaters at Walton, or maybe, if Lady Luck stayed with me, the Stour. However we made such good progress that I had decided to carry on, past Felixstowe and enter the Deben. The flood started to run against us, but it didn’t impede Bubbles too much and by lunchtime I was approaching the bar.

There, the wind fell even lighter and the sea around me seemed to turn into molten glass. The sails slatted in the slight swell, the sun blazed down and I sweated as I ate a sandwich. Several yachts were converging on the Woodbridge Haven Buoy and a small freighter was anchored to seaward in the south-east.

These lulls usually foretell a change of wind direction and I looked anxiously, this way and that, for its return. In my mind was an experience I had less than a month before when the breeze had not only changed direction, but strength as well. A sudden gust, out of an almost clear blue sky had laid Bubbles on her ear. It had grown within minutes from a light air into a full blooded gale. On that occasion I had run her under bare poles into the Crouch, badly frightened and glad of shelter. The force 8 had lasted for two days.

Cloud had begun to build up in the south-east and I wondered just what we were in for. The bar was close by and in theory at least the flood would take us in to shelter — if only we could make those last few cables.

The sea appeared to reach up to the clouds themselves and the distinction between them and the sky was no more. Without warning the freighter disappeared from view. “Here it comes,” I thought and putting my half eaten sandwich aside, I set the topping lift and scragged down a sizeable reef in the main.

I must have looked rather stupid, sitting there in an almost flat calm, well-reefed. And indeed, I thought I saw amusement and surprise on the faces of the crew of the nearest yacht. Perhaps, I reflected, they could permit themselves a quiet chuckle with something like a 40% ballast ratio. That was a luxury I didn’t have in Bubbles and I waited apprehensively.

A light breeze filled in from the south-east and the horizon shrank even further. The other yachts ghosted forward towards the bar, but undercanvassed as she was Bubbles barely stemmed the flood tide and I was left alone after a few minutes.

I stared to windward, half expecting the sea to boil as it had done on that previous occasion. So hard did I stare that spots seemed to develop before my eyes. I blinked and turned away for a few moments and looked back again. Sure enough, the spots were still there.

And then it happened… from out of the cloud they came, so thick that the sky darkened. Instead of the expected maelstrom, I was looking in awe at a profusion of Red Admirals and Large Whites. Most flew overhead, making for the shore in an eerie noiseless flight, but a considerable number began to line the pulpit rails, the rigging and the sails, presumably finding the butterfly equivalent of a pit stop. In moments Bubbles and I were covered with them. However, the swarm continued silently overhead in a seemingly endless procession as I watched in wonder.

The wind rose slightly and Bubbles and her unlikely visitors slowly forged towards the bar. Soon I was able to bear away for the entrance, easing the sheets as I did. This displaced some, but with most of our rare cargo still on board we nosed our way between the exposed shingle heaps and the flood pushed through into the Deben. Once inside I had room to shake out my reef which disturbed the remainder who, a few at a time, left us to join the swarm still flying overhead.

My immediate, stomach fluttering panic was over, although the sky to windward had taken on an unsettled look. A gentle south-easterly took me up to Kyson by 5.30, where I anchored and went below for a meal. Moments later the heavens did open, the wind rose and the thunder roared. By that time I was safe and sound — although I wondered whether my visitors were as lucky.

I began to wonder how they came to be out at sea in the first place, as I imagined that these tiny and flimsy creatures were ‘home grown’ so to speak and had no capacity for long distance travel. However an entomologist I knew put me right a few weeks later.

“Oh no,” she said. “They migrate, sometimes over hundreds of kilometres of sea.” Turning the pages of a heavy bound book she read, “1508, the 23rd year of Henry the Seventh, on the ninth of July… so thicke as flakes of snow… that men in the fields without the towne of Galleys could not see the towne at foure of the clock in the aftarnone, they flew so highe and so thicke.”

She read on. “Later Barrett, the Victorian entomologist, wrote that there were… Many cases of vast flights at sea, sometimes to form clouds like a snow storm, or to cover a vessel and its sails, when alighted.” She continued, “One serious estimate, was of 400 hundred million adults in a front almost 3 miles wide.”

I’ve always gone sailing for a multitude of experiences, but never before has such a multitude come to me!