Medway Barge Match 2002

In the past many hundreds of Thames sailing barges plied the waters of the River Medway and the nearby London River, also known as the Thames. They carried everything that the City needed from Portland stone to build the City to the food the population consumed. They carried straw for horses, the horses themselves and the manure from their other end. Barges like and including these traded in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth Century.

When the bargemen stopped working they raced their boats for fun and competition. The barges were owned by Companies with significant fleets of boats. They chose their best boats and often crewed them with just skippers from other boats in the Company fleet. Imagine being the Skipper of Skippers.

Now the only cargo they carry is fare paying passengers, mainly on day trips.

The most exciting ones, some say too exciting, are on Barge Match races like this one. The Medway Barge Match has run for more than one hundred years. Only the Americas Cup race and the Thames Barge Match are older. The wooden or steel barges are all originals, no new boats are accepted. A number of them like Capt. Peter Dodds boat ‘Mirosa’ (built 1892) is still engine less and most barges are a century old or there abouts.

That does not mean that modern Sailing Barge racing is not competitive. It is. As the Medway Barge Match brochure always says on its cover ‘God Save the Queen’.

The matching tallshipsandsmallships gallery photogaph is ‘Edme' winning the 2001 Medway Barge Match’ (another engineless boat) to make a pair of pictures.