Between the rooftops I spotted a white-sailed yacht close-hauled and heading north. Ebb must be away, I thought, as I drove down the hill from Aldeburgh’s St Peter & St Paul’s Church.

Onshore the brown seas broke beige on the Suffolk shingle and their undertow confirmed the tide had turned. Yet in the river, which runs parallel with the coast at this point, the moored yachts were all facing south. Here, the tide was still flooding.

Momentarily puzzled, a voice came into my head: ‘Stupid boy,’ and, with this corrective, I remembered that high water off Slaughden Quay runs two hours longer than at the mouth of the river.

The voice was that of Peter Wilson, who with a sort of ironic regality would keep the observed at heel as they hoped not to be confirmed as duffers.

The owner of Aldeburgh Boatyard, builder of medal-winning Dragons, restorer of classic boats, and racer of 8m yachts, I first met Peter Wilson one rainy evening when I rowed ashore from Polonaise my 18ft Essex One Design, with crew Pete Willetts.

We were seeking a B&B having tired of a week under canvas, our damp sleeping bags nestled each side of the plate case.

A lugubrious face appeared through the rain-streaked windows of the Aldeburgh Yacht Club. ‘Pretty little boat, what is she?’ he asked.

I told him and another person at the bar said: ‘She’s almost unique, then?’

Peter fixed him with a baleful stare: ‘She can’t be almost unique. She’s either unique or she’s nothing at all. Stupid boy.’

What seemed a tad harsh, was, I came to learn, simply the honest and friendly admonishment of guidance handed out equally to sirs and serfs. It was the result of a private education and although too few semesters to graduate from Glasgow University, enough to claim he did, and not the patter of a pedant.

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When people don’t smile unless it’s necessary it tends to throw those of us who brandish the grin over-effusively as being imposters.

However, if you could squirm in comfort then Peter was a generous host. That night all those years ago, he put us up in his alleyway home and even cooked a superb dinner of crab and ginger while Bach played on an old gramophone.

At least he allowed us to buy the beer which the landlord of the White Hart dispensed into an empty magnum gin bottle.

It was in the White Hart, seated at the chair which brandished his name that Peter, aged 88, fell.

Knowing instinctively not to utter a crass statement like ‘it’s what he would have wanted,’ I at least took comfort from his lengthy span ending on his badged chair in the bar of his local pub as being almost certainly what the rest of us would have wanted for him!

Fortunately, I saw him not too long ago – at last summer’s classic regatta on the Orwell where he was with his motor-yacht. His impassive stare, though a little more puffy than I recall, was just as benevolently superior.

Here was a man who was friends with the Aga Khan, the King of Norway, the late Queen Elizabeth’s lawyer, Mark Bridges, whose 30ft Yeoman Junior he rebuilt, and Mike Richey for whom he built one of his Jester yachts, for once talking about his own achievements.

He told me that he’d sailed to most 8m events, including La Trinite, Oslo and the Clyde, excluding the one in Switzerland as France was in the way.

‘See you again on the river before too long,’ he said.

Alas, I didn’t see him again, but gathered with 350 mourners at the church where Reverend Celia Cook, accurately said: ‘We will miss his wisdom and presence.’

At the AYC clubhouse I pocketed my order of service – emblazoned with the scantlings of If, Peter’s 8m, to help myself to an oyster offered up on a mountain of ice.

Before the ice had melted, the yacht out at sea had disappeared over the horizon. Peter would have approved his use of a fair tide.

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