I like to be afloat before the cuckoo sounds through the woods of Essex, but this year heavy rain has held back many boats at Carter & Ward’s yard at the head of the River Roach.

The day I launched the wind was due east, and the sun hot. My Contessa 32 nudged the mud at Sutton Wharf, but fortunately I was able to get her off.

So she’s all moored up and ready to go at her new station: Paglesham, not far from the bones of Beagle, made famous by her botanist-philosopher Charles Darwin.

I’m moored next to an East Coast classic: the 28ft wooden centre-boarder Halloween, built at Shuttlewood’s Boatyard in the 1930s and still as good as the day she was first launched.