THE music set the mood as soon as we boarded the tender.
Great songs, old songs, nostalgia and flashbacks; Rescue Me by Fontella Bass, Caroline by The Fortunes, San Francisco by Scott McKenzie. It was impossible not to feel happy.
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The anticipation built as we sailed out to MV Ross Revenge.
Once a trawler, the Ross Revenge is the third of the legendary Radio Caroline ships and we were going on board for a tour.
Mention Radio Caroline to people of a certain age and their first reaction will be a smile.
Just tuning into this iconic pirate radio station was exciting. It felt forbidden, cool.
Then there was the music — all the brand new releases you rarely heard on the wireless back when the BBC was the only station on the dial.
The pirate radio ship was record producer Ronan O’Rahilly’s idea.
Unable to get air time for his acts, he started his own station with two ships, MV Radio Caroline and MV Mi Amigo. The first record on the turntable on March 28, 1964, was Not Fade Away by the Rolling Stones.
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In March 1980, the Mi Amigo foundered in heavy seas.
Reluctantly the DJs abandoned ship, dramatically rescued by the RNLI lifeboat just before she went down.
No lives were lost but thousands of precious records were.
The station started transmitting from her replacement, the Ross Revenge in 1983.
Eight years later, in a force ten storm, she too was shipwrecked.
Eventually restored by dedicated volunteers, she now broadcasts from the Blackwater Estuary off West Mersea, Essex, where we caught the tender.
It took just 20 minutes to get alongside the ship, her famous red hull bright in the sunshine.
The tour started with a coffee in the mess.
Peter Phillips, one of the Eighties DJs, gave us an introduction and patiently answered questions he must have heard before — who was Radio Caroline named after? (JFK’s daughter); was life on radio ships like the movie The Boat That Rocked? (definitely not!).
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We were split into two groups and taken around the ship.
There’s a fair amount of clambering about to do so you need to be reasonably mobile.
Down in the hold, my husband, a radio frequency engineer, was excited (bless) to see the powerful 50kW RCA transmitter (a big deal apparently).
I could have spent hours browsing the thousands of vinyl LPs neatly shelved in the record library.
It was interesting to see the old studio with its dated equipment and compare it to the new one next door. Everything’s digital now, the DJ made it all look so simple as he broadcast his live show.
He even managed to fit in a request from me — Me And You And A Dog Named Boo by Lobo (a bit cheesy I know, but I love it).
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It was a fascinating tour of this stubborn radio station, the last pirate radio ship in the world.
She survived struggles, storms, acts of parliament and even an armed raid.
Lapped by the waves, she continues to broadcast great music over the airwaves — and shows no sign of fading away.
