It is 118 miles non stop from The Medway to Brighton,
its 108 miles from Southampton to Brixham, it is even over 70 miles around the
Isle of Wight, but the 63 miles from the Needles
to Cherbourg is the one passage you have to do to gain respect and be recognised
by all as a 'proper' sailor.
The forecast was superb, a ridge of high pressure had settled over the channel
promising around four days of stable NE winds of between F3-4 and the wife and
I were on our annual week long summer cruise. She had just qualified for her
Day Skipper ticket, theory and practical, and the boat was in tip top condition
after a winter of serious maintenance, and we had brought our Passports with
us so there really was no excuse. We simply had to go!
We had sailed up to Lymington Yacht Haven the previous day and had spent a beautiful
evening in idyllic conditions. The following morning we awoke to more of the
same, cast off and that was it, we were off. Out past the Needles, turn left
and head south.
Anne on Watch
We hoisted the main after some debate. The idea of having a wife that was enthusiastic
enough about sailing to get her Day Skipper was a dream come true to start with,
but when we have what descends into a marital spat about whether there is enough
breeze to warrant hoisting, I begin to long for the times she used to sit wistfully
in the cockpit smiling prettily with the wind in her hair as we careened into
a broach and I tried to dump the main, hold the course, look romantically into
her loving eyes, and desperately try to remain cool despite the fact we were
rounding up out of control in the path of a 60' Maxi hurtling downwind with
its 'enormospinnaker' obscuring its helmsman's view. This list I would regularly
perform on my own without the need for any 'discussion'.
The worst thing about it all is that she is of course right, but I only discover
this fact after I have played the ships 'Master Before God' routine and the
main is up and hanging like a dirty sheet, limp and useless in the windless
calm. At least Anne is not the kind of wife to labour the point and so despite
the obvious pointlessness of having the main up, she does not rub my nose in
it by making me take it down again, instead she happily wallows in her conceited
satisfaction as I adjust the living hell out of it to try and get some drive,
then fail and motor onward leaving it to flop and bang above our heads whilst
the iron wind blows hard beneath our feet. Only 53 miles left to go. Anne does
helpfully point out that with the main hoisted we will be more visible to shipping:
This as we cross a mirror calm sea in 15 miles of visibility. Bless her!
Leaving British waters. It's a strange feeling, leaving the 12 mile limit.
This is it - international waters. Disapointingly the sea is the same colour
and there is no line of Union Jacks to mark our territory, just the receding
hump of the Isle of Wight behind us.
I decided to rig a preventer to keep the main from banging around each time
a wave rolled beneath us. Sensibly donning a lifejacket I clambered onto the
cockpit coaming as Anne sheeted the boom in. Her error was in trying to steer
at the same time, so we executed an accidental gybe with me clinging to the
boom as I was swept dramatically across the cockpit and out over the other side
of the boat wailing with fear. I managed to hook my feet around the lifelines
and with the wife's panicked sheeting in and me dragging myself in by the ankles
I was soon safely aboard. Harsh words were exchanged and Anne muttered something
about "fully up to date insurance premiums" and disappeared below
to put the kettle on.
We see the first shipping traffic and put the sausages on. It's baking hot, so I offer up my 'summer sausage buttys'. This is sausage on a bread roll with salad; Lettuce, tomato, onion, mayonnaise and mustard. Fantastic! A burger by any other name but with pork. If I ever meet Ronald Macdonald I shall recommend it to him... The MacSausage butty. Kwality!
Half way across and the shipping is keeping out of our way which is good but to compensate we have some other navigational issues to attend to. The English channel has a current which runs west for about six hours then the tide turns, and it runs east for about six hours. However we are doing a crossing of 13 hours and we did not start at the beginning of the tide stream so some preparatory calculation was required to make sure that pointing the boat toward Cherbourg didn’t mean the tide drifted us across to Alderney. Not a bad landfall for sure, but not our intended destination. This calculation had led me to set a course of 170°. Our current problem has arisen because of our use of modern technology. Enigma is fitted with a GPS chart plotter which shows a little icon of us superimposed upon a fully scaleable chart of the entire world (I know, cool isn’t it), so we can at all times see exactly where we are. The problem was that as the tide swept us first one way and then the other the plotter showed that we appeared to be drifting too far to the East to allow the tide to sweep us back to Cherbourg when it turned in the late afternoon. After some re calculation of the remaining hours of tidal vectors, we altered course, after an hour on the new course I was still not convinced so I sent Anne down to offer her version. By the time we had both done it twice we decided that our original course was right in the first place and if we had stayed on it we would have been just fine. In the preceding hundreds of years before the luxury of GPS plotters, mariners would have had to trust their first calculations, as once you are out of the sight of land there is little but the heavens to take your bearings from. However in these days of pinpoint electronics you have the luxury of having so much information you can spend extra time being worried about whether you were right in the first place. Perhaps if I had have turned the bugger off we might have saved ourselves a head ache.
We finally dropped the main. When the tide turned our relative wind angle had
changed enough for the darned thing to lollop noisily around like a bored teenager
dragged out on a family outing.
During the whole procedure my dear wife held onto her politeness to the point
where it was almost patronising, but I pretended not to notice.
It is a strange feeling, we have been going for seven hours and there's nothing
left to do. This morning there was all the navigation to worry about, breakfast,
messing around with sails, weather forecasts, dinner, shipping to watch for
and the hours passed by quickly, but this! Nothing to see at all just sea and
sky. No ships. Just horizon. And the trips a long way from being over.
It feels wrong to say boring, as that makes it sound like a complaint, but with
nothing to do but watch the GPS change its data for the next four hours, it
kind of feels err.... tedious?... monontous?... Alright! Boring.
A bee lands to add interest. I race around trying to get a exciting picture
with the macro setting on the camera. I fail, the bee flies off before the various
settings have been optimised. How does David Attenborough do it? I slump back
in the cockpit seats and look out to sea. I start thinking about all that water
and what happens if the engine fails or we hit a submerged object and start
to sink. I shudder. It's a long way from home. Critics of Ellen Macarthur have
said her trip was easy by comparison to the early single handed voyages by the
likes of Francis Chichester and Robin Knox-Johnston... I’m only half way
accross the channel and I’m starting to feel isolated and a little nervous.
No matter what technology you have to hand, being deep in the Southern Ocean
two thousand miles from anywhere is not something any human being could think
of as being 'easy'.
16:12
Lat: 49° 53.042 N Lon: 001° 22.456 W Miles Run: 49.36NmLAND AHOY! Just inside the 12 mile limit we hoist the French courtesy ensign and the heat haze ahead occasionally gives up the dreamlike image of a lighthouse that drifts in and out of our vision over the next hour. Above the heat haze the high cliffs of the Cotentin Peninsula start to materialise, and the land of the continent takes shape on our horizon.
We are close enough inshore for me to now change from using the large scale
passage chart of the English channel and open up the 1:50,000 scale 'Approaches
to Cherbourg' chart. Transferring our current position to the new, more detailed
chart I suddenly realise we are currently headed for a military practice area
and explosives dumping ground which is clearly marked as 'Entry Prohibited'.
Just to add insult to injury I zoom in on the GPS plotter to the same scale
and see that the same feature appears highlighted in bright red almost grinning
sardonically back from the screen. I truly hate smug electronics.
Despite being far slower, far smaller, having fewer men and fewer guns than
our French Naval counterparts we break British Naval tradition and alter course
to avoid being blown up. If Nelson was alive I would have been hung for 'failing
to pursue an enemy', and even Cap'n Jack Aubrey would have had me flogged around
the fleet, but these are modern times and after all this not an Atoll in the
South Pacific and the Frogs are not testing nuclear weapons any more, are they...
I say, what’s that mushroom shaped cloud all about???
And there it, is our destination. Cherbourg. The monstrous forts protecting the outer harbour from British invasion are clearly visible, we have less than an hour to go before we dock and I’m quite knackered and emotional.
We are all secure on one of the huge selection of visitors pontoons. Very satisfying.
We wobble along to the marina office nervously clutching our fat bundle of passports,
ships papers, insurance documents, Yachtmaster certification, radio license,
you name it... Well in fact the RYA website named it under the "What
to consider before taking your boat abroad" section, we just made sure
we had brought it with us.
After all that attention to detail all the man on the desk wanted from us was
some money and the name of our boat, which he spelt wrong. I am not however
complaining in any way shape or form, it was half the price of a Solent Marina
and I think 'Engma' sounds more European.
'Engma'
in Port Chantereyne Marina - Cherbourg
