Woodrolfe Creek from the marina entrance at HW-4 (July 2005).There's no getting around it - marinas are expensive old places. Moorings are a very sensible way of slashing running costs, if you can make use of them. I wish I could, but I'm effectively forced to pay top dollar because of my time commitments elsewhere. Planning sailing time ahead can be difficult, and if I can't just go and jump aboard Arabella at a moment's notice I might as well not bother owning her. For this reason, a marina is the only realistic option for me.
I purchased Arabella through Woodrolfe Brokerage at Tollesbury Marina in Essex. They were thoroughly nice people, and there was an impressive degree of co-ordination between the brokers, the marina management and the yard & repair shop, as well as an excellent club house with swimming pool and tennis courts. Inevitably I was tempted to berth Arabella at Tollesbury as the easy option. The reason I didn't is very apparent from the photo above! The approach to the marina dries out and access is possible only at around 2 hours either side of HW. When I referred to the tide tables, it soon became obvious that day-sailing was almost never going to be manageable at sensible times of day at weekends. Since this would not let me use Arabella at a moment's notice, sadly I ruled out Tollesbury and went in search of an all-tide berth elsewhere.
I soon found that most of the all-tide marinas on the East Coast are bunched up on the River Orwell near Ipswich, which is quite a bit further away from London than Tollesbury. The obvious exceptions are at Burnham-on-Crouch and on the River Medway, and however irrationally, I don't much enjoy either place - it's purely personal, of course, and I mean no offence to people based in those areas, but I find the Crouch too flat and featureless, the Medway/Swale too isolated from other areas and too restricted in sailing room by the muds and sands.
Once you have to travel as far as Ipswich from the centre of London, where I live, then the South Coast becomes a realistic alternative in terms of travel time. In addition, the Solent is the cruising area that I personally know best and there's wealth of easy and picturesque stopovers within easy reach of each other. The downside is that a lot of other people think the same way that I do, which pushes up marina prices and makes for some 'interesting' practical exercises in applying the ColRegs for multiple crossing vessels on summer weekends. Anyway....having checked out marinas in the Solent and Portsmouth Harbour, the new home for Arabella will be Southampton.
Interestingly, there was little difference between the Orwell Marinas and those in Southampton or Portsmouth price-wise (maybe £10-15 per month overall), which kind of exploded the myth of the 'cheap' East Coast for me. To be fair, Tollesbury was a lot cheaper, but that partly reflected its tidal restrictions.
Unfortunately, neither my spare time nor my experience would sensibly stretch to sailing Arabella from the Blackwater around to the Solent. I've wimped out and organised overland transportation - she should be moved at the beginning of September.
