Our last newsletter to ECP readers, sent a month into the first lockdown, began "First and foremost, we hope that you and your family are safe and well." The same sentiments apply, eight months later, when most of us thought this would all be over.
If you managed to get some cruising done, well done indeed and I envy you, because for various reasons our boat stayed in the yard. Still, I did at least get a lot of jobs done in warm weather for a change! Absence of newsletters doesn't mean we've stopped everything - as ever, we have kept ears to the ground for updates, and the very few that have cropped up this year have been recorded on the website as usual, along with a stream of relevant 'News' items. And as ever, we encourage you to visit the website occasionally to keep an eye on what's happening.
News Items that are still current include long-term over-winter lock closures at Allington on the Medway (the head of tidal navigation) and South Dock Marina on the Thames, and the lack of a full survey at the Deben and Ore river entrances. We 'got round' the latter by asking Imrays to 'tweak' the existing chartlets to at least show the slightly changed routes in and out, and indeed a 2nd edition of the Ore chartlet was needed when the Weir buoy had to be moved. We are hugely grateful to the ECP reader who allowed us to include his aerial photos of the two entrances with the downloads.
We do hope that Trinity House will be able to survey these busy entrances properly this coming Spring.
In the Book Updates sections of our website, changes were few and far between, highly unusually, but include a correction to one of the Lowestoft 'rolling roads' which was highlighted for us by a reader, the loss of Orfordness lighthouse, and a few other minor detail changes. Easiest way to look at the list of these is to go to our 'Summary by Date' page.
We mentioned last time that we are now on Facebook, with an ECP Facebook Group page - feel free to 'Join' us; we have aimed to add any updates or hot news on there as and when they happen, as a heads-up to more details on our website which remains the prime source of information about our Ramsgate to Great Yarmouth cruising area.
The 5th Edition of ECP, published last August, is of course available as usual online through chandleries or direct from Imrays themselves, along with all their numerous other chart and book offerings. If you haven't yet bought one, I should remind you that the 5th is the one that all our updates and additions are aimed at, previous editions now being extremely out of date.
With Christmas upon us, I notice too that Imrays have some special offers for East Coasters - combination packs of charts, ECP and the CA Almanac, which you can find here. Something for your wish-list, perhaps!
We hope that you able to make the best of Christmas this year, and that we will all be able to get back to some kind of normality that allows us to enjoy some quality time afloat in 2021.
Kindest regards,
Dick Holness
Co-author and webmaster
East Coast Pilot.
Header photo: Seasonal scene at West Mersea.
If you no longer wish to receive our newsletters you can
unsubscribe using the link below.
