the varsity regatta was always held at sea in boats which were borrowed for the occasion , and quite unfamiliar to all the competitors . the authorities had not yet been persuaded to award a half-blue for sailing as is done now . another member of that early team - and a subsequent Captain - was Francis Usborne , now Secretary of the royal yachting association . Stewart was always the principal spur . I was invited by his parents to stay on the Broads in their beautiful converted wherry Sundog ; she moved from regatta to regatta with a string of racing dinghies and one-designs towing astern , all superbly kept in trim by Cubitt Nudd , one of the best paid hands in all Norfolk . for these holidays I was usually Stewart &apos;s crew , but when his new fourteen-foot dinghy clover was built for him by Morgan Giles in beautifully selected teak , I wondered if I would be considered good enough to crew him in important races . much later , when I had crewed in less expertly handled dinghies and finally graduated to my very own fourteen-footer , I wondered if I would be good enough to beat Stewart ? without this friendly rivalry over the years I should never have been selected to represent Great Britain at the Olympic games ( with Stewart as my spare man ) in 1936 ; I should never have won a bronze medal there - and likely enough I should never have become ( quite accidentally as it transpired ) the President of the international yacht racing union . most of the races at Ely were sailed in deadly earnest , and it was a good training ground , for in so narrow a river inches counted and fine judgement could be cultivated . a well-rounded buoy passed less than a foot away down the boat &apos;s side as a matter of standard practice . a boat &apos;s length was to be gained when going about by shooting up along the bank before filling away on a new tack . on occasion the sailing was more light-hearted . there was an afternoon when an unofficial prize had been offered for the helmsman who , sailing single-handed , contrived to capsize his boat first after the starting gun had been fired . the Commodore had not been informed of this plan ; he walked up the bank with his megaphone , shouting let the sheet go , you stupid boy , you &apos;ll have the boat over in a moment if you &apos;re not careful . but his warning was of no avail and a few seconds later I won the prize . chapter 15 of pinkfeet and punts and blue geese . during our Christmas holiday on the Solway we had heard rumours that very large numbers of geese assembled at the head of the great estuary upon their first arrival from the Arctic in late September . between the River Esk and the River Eden is a vast merse covered only by high spring tides and for a few years this was used as an assembly point for what must have been at times something like thirty per cent of the world &apos;s pinkfooted geese . nowadays no such concentrations of geese are to be found on Rockliffe Marsh as we saw there in the autumns of 1929 and 1930 . great numbers of pinkfeet still come to the Solway , but not in any concentration until well into October , and their headquarters is now ten miles further to the westward around the Lochar mouth and the sanctuary provided for them on the Kinmount estate near Annan . on 20th September , 1929 , I set out from London alone in the family &apos;s Austin Seven and arrived at Sark Bridge Farm , Gretna , eleven hours later . next morning I found that many thousands of geese had already arrived at Rockliffe . all that day more were coming in . this was the first time I had ever seen geese arriving on migration . there were little bunches coming in high over the metal Bridge , heading the westerly wind and planing down on to the marsh - some in threes and fours , some in groups of a dozen or twenty . the little parties were scattered about the sky almost wherever you looked . it is a pattern I have seen many times since , but never more impressively than on that first day . I know now that the geese were coming from Greenland and Iceland , but in those days Spitzbergen was thought to be the breeding ground of most of the British pinkfeet . but wherever they came from , it was far away in Arctic or sub-Arctic lands , and it added immeasurably to the mysterious appeal of these wonderful birds . Rockliffe Marsh was private shooting , but by crossing the Esk in a boat it was possible to intercept the geese at the marsh edge , or from lying-pits out on the sand . in the week that I was there I shot twelve geese and was vastly pleased with my success . more recently I believe manorial rights extending to the river channels of the Eden and Esk have been substantiated , but in 1929 this had not been clarified and the sand was widely , if erroneously , held to be free shooting . digging in on the sand is not now regarded as a wise procedure , for if it is extensively practised on a goose roost it seems eventually to drive the geese away . this may have been one of the contributary causes of the abandonment by the grey geese of Wells and Holkham , though I do not think it influenced their change of habits on the Solway . but in that first autumn on the Solway digging lying pits on the sand seemed only to be a practical if difficult method of goose shooting , and a number of my geese were bagged while shooting from their scanty cover . for my last two days in Scotland I moved westward to Wigtown Bay in order to go punting with Major Hulse - the expert as we called him . I joined him at Creetown and we spent the two days afloat in pursuit of wigeon , which confirmed my earlier conclusion that punting was the best that wildfowling had to offer . our bag was meagre and the occasion was chiefly memorable for my meeting with Adam Birrell and for a stirring return journey in the punt in a gale of wind . I had met Adam very briefly at the end of my previous day &apos;s punting with Major Hulse , but now for the first time I recognised this was no ordinary fisherman-wildfowler . he was a first-class naturalist , with an astonishingly wide ( self-administered ) education . he was delightful company whether on a fowling expedition or bird-watching or fishing , and we remained in fairly regular communication thereafter for a quarter of a century . after the two days &apos; punting I set off from Creetown in the Austin Seven at a quarter to eight in the morning and arrived in London at a quarter to eight in the evening , having stopped for half an hour in Carlisle and three-quarters of an hour at Boroughbridge where I had lunch . it is an interesting commentary on the Great North Road and motoring conditions in 1929 that I was able to make the 380-mile journey in a seven-horsepower car at an average speed of just over 35 miles per hour . it is also perhaps worth recording that my ten days in Scotland had cost me almost exactly &amp;pound;10 . on the flood-waters of the Bedford Levels we had Penelope and Grey Goose , but we still had no sea-going double punt for the Wash , and this must clearly be remedied . Mr Mathie , a boat-builder in Cambridge , was commissioned to build one , based mainly on the design and specifications of the expert &apos;s punt . she was to be twenty-four foot long , four-foot beam , with a twelve-foot cockpit , and she was to be called Kazarka - the Russian name for the red-breasted goose . Kazarka was launched just below Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge on 11th December , 1929 . on the following day I set out with a companion , David Lewis , to sail her to the coast . there was a south-westerly wind which was very strong at times and we made good progress until just before Ely , when there was a stretch which came closer to the eye of the wind and the lee boards could not really cope with it . but a passing sugar beet tug took us in tow as far as the Ely beet factory . thereafter we sailed without difficulty to Brandon Creek which was to be our staging point for the day . there is a fascination in the bareness of the Fenland river banks . trees are few and far between , and the river runs artificially straight or nearly so for many a mile , broken only by an occasional bridge . from the punt we had no view into the distance , for the high green banks rose steeply on either side to the skyline at most fifty yards away . the flat fenland fields , mostly below the level of the river , were hidden from us ; and yet I remember that the passage , the testing of our boat on her maiden voyage , the anticipation of her arrival on the fowling grounds of the Wash , the pleasure of spinning along under the small sail , all added up to a sheer delight which I can clearly recall today - just thirty years later . Christopher Dalgety came to meet us at Brandon Creek , and we took David Lewis to Ely to catch a train ( which he missed ) and then went on to the Globe Hotel at King &apos;s Lynn which was our coastal headquarters . re-reading my shooting diaries in 1959 in the course of writing this book I came upon the entry for the following morning , Friday , 13th December , 1929 , which is of more interest than I realised at the time . there was a moderate west-south-westerly breeze blowing as we walked out along the old drove at Terrington ( past a pole evidently set up on the salting long ago as a landmark and known inevitably as the north pole ) and out to the edge of the salting . I was in position at 6.40 , says my diary , streak of dawn having been at 6.10 . as it got light geese began honking all round . a lot of mallards had been sitting at the edge of the mud as I came up and now a lot more came over . I could have had several shots but the geese were all round . at last I saw about eight geese coming straight towards me . they sagged away on the wind and passed rather wide . I had a shot but without success . the sound of the shot put up a big lot of about 200 which had been sitting farther to the east . these pitched again about 200-300 yards away . I looked at them and thought that one on the left of the flock looked different . with the glass I could see at once that it was a white goose . his head , neck and breast were pure white and his back was dark brown , darker than the surrounding pinkfeet . from the fact that he was a head taller than the rest ( and longer in the leg ) and also that his bill was very large and thick , I felt no doubt that he was an albino greylag . in general size he was much larger than the pinkfeet and was much more on the alert . he had his head up the whole time - once when only three other geese in the whole 200 had their heads up . after the flock had walked towards me a little , they sat for a while , and then I think they must have scented me , for away they went , crossing my creek further down and joining some more geese on the mud to the west . well , there it is ! there is the first record of the blue goose for Europe . the description is perfect . we even know that he was the rather less common form in which the white of the head extends on to the breast and belly . I may have exaggerated the size a little , and I gave him ( and his fellow pinkfeet ) a sense of smell which I do not now believe could have accounted for their departure . 