Hawkins - Forensic Investigators

Inform me when this site is updated

1st September 2008

Well I’ve left the midges behind and have managed to get all the bog myrtle out of my hair although there’s no getting away from the fact that it does need cutting.

There are some places that I have always been afraid to visit in case they don’t live up to expectations. The Great Pyramid is one and so is the Grand Canyon. I haven’t yet been to the former but the latter is spectacular and not ruined by tourism as I had feared. Cape Wrath was another such place and it did not disappoint one bit. The weather was kind, but left you with the feeling of what it would be like to be caught in a strong onshore wind in this loneliest of places. The cape itself is high and impressive and for me, was a real turning point.

Loch Eriboll turned out to be my last lonely anchorage, before a thundering sail over to Orkney in a rising headwind.

Hoy Sound, the passage into Scapa Flow and Stromness, is impassable at the wrong state of the tide and so to kill an hour or two we pulled into the lee of the impressive cliffs of the west coast of Hoy which includes the Old Man. Then, with a collection of local boats which were also waiting, we were through into the Flow.

Scapa Flow is redolent with history and ghosts. For two World Wars it was the principle anchorage for the British High Seas Fleet, but almost all traces of that are now gone and all that remains is a huge expanse of sheltered water. ‘Sheltered’ is of course a relative term because what might be sheltered to a 36,000 ton battleship still managed to get Snow Goose dancing around like a demented teenager. It was here that at the end of the First World War, the German High Seas Fleet was detained until a peaceful Saturday in June 1919 when the entire armada of 200 ships was scuttled, with spectacularly organised coordination on the orders of Admiral Von Reuter in a last act of defiance. The many wrecks that remain are now a Mecca for sport divers.

The Orkneys were a surprise for me, having never been there before. I suppose that since I was used to the wild and lonely hills of the Highlands I had expected something similar and was taken aback to find a series of low-lying fertile islands with such extensive agriculture and a rich mixture of Scottish and Norse culture. St Magnus’ Cathedral in Kirkwall is a spectacular edifice of rich red sandstone (don’t worry, I’m not going off on another geological monologue) that would not look out of place in a far larger city. Hiding in a corner of the cathedral is a memorial to one of Orkneys many famous sons and daughters, John Rae who was always something of a boyhood hero of mine although I have no idea how I first heard of him. At a time when the British Empire was stamping all over native cultures the world over and trying it’s best to do the same to nature, Rae rather bucked the trend. He explored large parts of northern Canada by living with and adopting the practices and lifestyle of the Inuit. I suppose he felt that having lived there for centuries they might have learned a thing or two about survival on the edge. It was John Rae who finally unearthed the fate of the Franklin expedition.

Franklin had set off with two ships, HMS Erebus and Terror in 1845 on the best equipped and funded expedition to seek out the fabled northwest passage from the Atlantic, over the top of Canada to the Pacific. At the end of their first summer they pulled into a suitable looking bay as was the custom with polar exploration and secured the ships to be frozen safely in and then released by the spring thaw to continue the next summer. Unfortunately they had picked one of the warmest summers for many years and unknowingly picked a bay that hardly ever thawed. They were not released the next summer or the one after that and effectively vanished without trace. None of them was seen alive again. Several futile expeditions were sent to look for them and a number of people made names for themselves trying, but it was actually Rae who found out what had happened by talking to eye-witnesses among the Inuit who told of a group of white men walking south, dragging boats and dying as they went. It seemed that the survivors of the expedition had tried to walk out across Canada and a glance at a map will show you the scale of the task they faced. The last of them had died during the winter of 1850. Guided by the Inuit Rae found numerous artefacts and reasonably clear evidence of cannibalism as the members of the expedition had died. Rae’s news when he returned home did not go down well with Victorian society, which could not countenance the notion of members of the Royal Navy eating each other. Anyway they disliked the way Rae had made his discoveries, by talking to ‘natives’ and he was ostracised including a good drubbing from Charles Dickens. He explored and charted more of Arctic Canada than almost anyone else but was the only explorer of that area not to receive a knighthood. I’d like to think he wasn’t that bothered. His memorial is a monumentally ugly piece of work but I enjoyed visiting it anyway.

Also in St Magnus’ is the bell from HMS Royal Oak. In October 1939, Guenther Prien took the U-47 through a tiny passage called Holm Sound on the east side of Scapa Flow. He torpedoed the Royal Oak which sank quickly with dreadful loss of life. The wreck lies undisturbed as a war grave and still leaks oil which rises to the surface and on calm days forms a shimmering film around the buoy that marks the spot. There used to be a tradition in which Royal Navy divers went down to the wreck once a year and replaced the white ensign but I don’t know if they still do it. We anchored in Holm Sound just before leaving Orkney and you couldn’t help admiring the nerve of someone who would take a submarine through such a tiny passage.

Just north of North Ronaldsay Snow Goose and I collected our furthest north of 59o 26.5’ N. It was here if ever that I was going to try for the Shetlands but it’s a long way and the forecast was for strong headwinds. I wasn’t going to motor into a heavy sea for 12 hours just to say I’d been there, so sadly my aim to sail round the UK will not be realised. On the plus side, I never really expected to get to Shetland and was able to console myself with a look at the seaweed-eating sheep of North Ronaldsay. The diet, which I gather is unique, apparently gives the meat a strong, rich flavour and is much in demand as a delicacy in fashionable restaurants. I couldn’t buy some anywhere and since I’m fairly sure they still hang rustlers in that part of the world I resisted the temptation to bundle one into the dinghy. Anyway they move pretty quickly and I don’t think I’d ever have caught one, unfit as I am after three months of sitting down.

Speaking of living off the land, I’ve changed my tactics with my lobster pot and have now notched up two decent sized crabs and one lobster. Also a curious looking thing with claws which tasted horrible.

Sadly, North Ronaldsay will always stay in my mind as the place I had my most horrible experience of the trip (so far at least) and which I don’t really fancy writing about yet. Suffice to say that thanks to the kindness and alertness of a number of locals I was spared the ignominy of coming home on the train.

I’m back on the mainland now having come down across the Moray Firth and past the great fishing and oil harbours of Fraserburgh and Aberdeen, neither of which are particularly keen on small boats dropping in. The last time I was in Fraserburgh was for a fire in a brand new freezer warehouse many years ago and its replacement was clearly visible on the shore, apparently built to the same design. I wonder if they fixed the problem!

In Stonehaven, tied up against the harbour wall I bumped into Mike Brooke. He was flying the burgee of Bosham Sailing Club where I learned to sail, so I popped over for a chat. It turns out that he also is sailing round Britain, but in a much smaller boat. 19’ as opposed to Snow Goose’s 32. Not only does he pip me grandly on the ‘tininess of boat’ issue, he’s also done rather better on the fundraising than me having raised £27,000 for Moorfields Eye Hospital in the hope of helping his Godson who has a rare genetic retinal defect. If you have a bob or two to spare then have a look at his website at www.theosfuture.org Oh and it’s possible that he’s even more in need of a barber than I am!

Tying up to harbour walls is fun but brings its own problems because your mooring lines have to cope with the rise and fall of the tide. If you secure everything at high tide then as the water level drops, so does the boat and you rip the cleats out of the deck. If you tie up at low tide then all the lines go floppy as the water comes in again. My solution is two very large weights that I hang on the lines to take up the slack as the tide comes in.

The last week has seen a major return to civilisation. Raucous Saturday night crowds on the harbour wall; paying harbour fees; shopping in big supermarkets rather than the little Spars I’d got used to. In Kinlochbervie I bought up their entire stock of fresh vegetables! The remoteness of the Highlands is just a pleasant memory, but I am doing my best to put a brave face on it and wring every scrap of interest from this section of coast which in its own way is every bit as fascinating.

The tide on the River Tay was impressive; 3 ½ knots sweeping past the mooring buoy made a lasting impression on me.

The sea birds have been changing. I’ve lost the skuas, haven’t seen a puffin for ages and sadly have also been missing the fulmars for the last three days which is odd because my Observer Book of Birds tells me I should still see them. I’ve never seen so many gannets as in the Firth of Forth. They appear low on the horizon in huge groups and sweep past like attacking torpedo bombers as well as generally swooping around as if they own the place.

I’ve still got hordes of guillemots and razorbills which is lucky because I could watch them all day – they crack me up. My favourite game is to head towards a big group of them floating on the surface. As I get near they start to paddle out of the way looking anxiously over their shoulder until at last one of them loses its nerve and dives. That’s the signal for everyone else. When they dive they do a little flip and go down vertically so you’re treated to a multitude of white guillemot bottoms mooning at you and all of a sudden the surface of the sea is empty. Hang around tho’ because after a minute they all pop back up again and sit up in the water flapping their little wings to get the water off. They could really make you think you were seeing things because they disappear so fast that one moment the sea is covered with birds, look away to adjust something and they’ve all gone. We don’t get them at home and I shall really miss them.

At the moment I’m anchored just outside Dunbar harbour and will be heading on south tomorrow to cross the border back into England. I shall spend some time in Lindisfarne before pushing on to the urban centres of the Tyne and the Humber. My final hurdle is the passage across the wash back into the home waters of north Norfolk.

---

15th August 2008

I’m writing this in yet another very fine anchorage, this time in Loch Laxford, just south of Cape Wrath. For me, this is an appropriate time for reflection because Cape Wrath is a turning point in so many ways. If you believe the pilot books then I’m going to die because it’s the most dangerous place in the world, but it can’t really be worse than any other major headland.

But not only do I have to turn 90 to the right, once past it I will be heading back towards home and a more populated landscape. Gone will be the high mountains and isolated anchorages, to be replaced with more urban, lower lying areas and far busier harbours. Some of these are not at all easy to enter, particularly on your own. In terms of time, I’m ¾ of the way but I have always viewed Cape Wrath as half way and separating two worlds. So there’s a hint of melancholy tonight. Is this my last peaceful anchorage? No, but they will become rarer.

Flicking back through my logbook I see that since leaving Ireland I have lost only one day to a gale and even that was a half-hearted attempt. There’s been rain, I mean this is the Highlands after all, but it’s been only showery or at most half a day and my memory is of passing through the Highlands in sunshine and splendid sailing winds, with still evenings that bring out the midges. My discovery that bog myrtle gets rid of them has been a huge benefit.

To be fair, most days the wind has been on the nose but since I’ve only been doing short passages, that hasn’t mattered.

I hear the summer in the south has been disappointing again. For those of you there, sorry, but your loss has once again been the Highlands’ gain. No doubt I will get what’s coming to me and suffer with an endless succession of south easterly gales as I head homewards.

The region I’ve just passed through has an added attraction for me because it’s a geological ‘What’s What’. Many of the major puzzles in geology were solved in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century by people working in the western Highlands. There’s hardly a name on the map that isn’t attached to some geological discovery, event or sequence of rocks. It was here that thrusting was discovered. The notion that deep in the crust, sideways forces could push one enormous pile of rock up on top of another so that in contrast to the normal sequence, you could end up with older rocks on top of younger. The Moine Thrust is one of the world’s classics. It’s exposed near Assynt and you can walk up to the outcrop and put your hand on the 6” thick zone along which untold billions of tons of rock have slid sideways for hundreds of miles. It’s an astonishing thought.

My personal favourite is exposed in the area around Gruinard Bay and qualifies as the oldest landscape in the world. The very oldest rocks in the area are the Lewisian Gneiss which was formed between 3000 and 2000 million years ago (give or take a year or two) deep in the crust of the earth. Then by 1000 million years ago it had been raised to the surface forming a landscape across which rivers deposited the sandstones that we now call the Stoer Group. The whole lot, gneiss and sandstone was then buried again deep within the earth, but is now back at the surface with modern erosion stripping away the sandstones to reveal the Lewisian Gneiss, much as it was 1000 million years ago.

In the last few weeks, I’ve also been able to meet up with a few friends, notably Mike and Heather and their children who live in these parts. Mike looked after me when I worked in Antarctica. Basically he managed to stop me killing myself whilst wandering around looking at rocks. Mountaineer saves absent minded scientist sort of thing. Thanks to them I suffered a second infestation of children which livened up my dull routine no end!

Our old neighbours who have now moved to Aberdeen dropped in for tea as you do and most astonishingly, two friends from my days at Cambridge University just happened to be in the area.

Anyway, enough of all that. Fastening yourself to the bottom for a good night’s sleep; that’s what I really want to talk about.

When you stop for the night there are basically three options: a marina, a mooring or an anchor.

Marinas are to be found in areas with lots of boats because they’re expensive to build and you need to fill them up to get a return on your investment. Essentially they’re a series of floating pontoons anchored to the seabed somehow in a well sheltered location. They generally form a symbiotic relationship with other money-depleting places such as pubs, restaurants and chandleries. Marinas are to be found in great numbers along the south coast of England but tend to be rarer or completely absent elsewhere. Their advantage is that you can step from dry land onto the boat without the use of a dinghy which can be useful if you have lots of gear to load or unload. Their disadvantages are legion. They’re expensive (£15-£30 per night for Snow Goose) and they’re often noisy. In Dunstaffnage I had to put up with four boatloads of girls from Gordonstoun whooping it up till all hours in the neighbouring berths.

They do have showers and laundries attached (for which you have to pay extra), but the attraction of those facilities has faded as I look back with fondness at the strange places in which I have found showers and washing machines. In Ireland, many of the pubs had a shower in the back yard. Not great showers to be fair, but if you didn’t mind sharing with slugs and spiders they did the job and were sometimes hot. In Portrush I was heavily mothered by a couple on another boat who lived nearby and whisked me back to their place for a good scrub. On the island of Rona, just east of Skye, the warden lets you use his bathroom and washing machine so all in all, marinas don’t hold the key to everything.

Actually, if I might digress for a moment, the mothering phenomenon has been a new one on me and I suspect only applies to lone sailors. Even at the age of 46, if I stand around for long enough looking pathetic, tired and helpless, someone usually takes pity and offers drinks/a meal/shower/laundry. It’s an odd effect and I’m sure is based on a woman’s absolute conviction that a man cannot possibly cook a meal or work a washing machine. He might be good at hauling up sails and anchors or developing 4 day stubble, but show him a washing machine dial and he will select ‘Bizarre Wash’ and turn all his laundry pale grey.

Anyway, back to the thread…..marinas; they’re OK for a visit but I wouldn’t want to live in one.

The second option is to pick up a mooring. Once again, in areas of abundant boats they are to found in rich profusion, usually with a boat hanging off them. If there’s no boat you can pick them up. Some moorings have big friendly ‘V’s on them signifying that they’re for visitors and you’re actually allowed to pick them up. Round the other side there’s sometimes a smaller note saying ‘£5. Pay in Finnigan’s Bar’. On the south coast of England they’re less trusting and within 15 nanoseconds of you picking up the thing there will be the roar of powerful engines, a gleaming RIB will slide alongside and a charming official in a smart uniform but unaccountably without a stocking over their head, will require £15 off you. Any suggestion on your part that if they didn’t use such a stupidly large engine on their stupidly gleaming RIB then the rate could be halved, is met with stony silence. I generalise, but only in detail. In other, more enlightened parts of the world they realise that visiting boats are likely to spend money in the town and the moorings are there to encourage you to stay the night and spend, spend, spend.

Much cheaper to pick up a private mooring, preferably one marked ‘Private – In constant use’ in the same way that a sign in someone’s driveway saying ‘No Turning’ always tempts you to stop and turn just for fun. There’s an etiquette to picking up private moorings based on mutual exchange. Firstly, pick up a mooring of a suitable size for your boat. The holding power is basically proportional to the size of the buoy floating on top. Secondly, don’t go away and leave the boat, the owner might return and want to moor his own boat. Some people in busy areas leave a little tag on the buoy saying when they’ll be back. Thirdly, if the owner does return then you leave, sharpish. To that end, I always try to pick up a mooring with other vacant ones nearby so that if I have to move in the middle of the night it’s not far. And I always try to find one with loads of weed round the strop which suggests that it’s been lying in the water for some time and isn’t being used that season. Other than that, I use other people’s moorings, I hope they’re using mine. In the end it all works out.

Moorings are good in many ways. They’re easy to pick up and they save you the labour of hauling up great lengths of chain when you want to leave. For the owners they’re good because you can pack them in very close together. You can get away with this because the rope or chain joining the buoy on the surface to the weight on the bottom is not a lot longer than the depth of the water. This means you don’t move sideways much when the wind or tide changes. The downside is that you need a seriously large weight on the bottom. People tend to use local materials. In Fowey they use old railway bogeys off the china clay trains. Tractor tyres filled with concrete are another favourite. I don’t know what they’ve used in St Marys in Scilly but the moorings are closer together than anywhere else and look as if they could hold a battleship.

Moorings are very bad in the sense that when you pick them up you have absolutely no idea what’s going on ‘down below’. Visitors’ moorings tend to be official with insurance and regular inspections, stuff like that. With private moorings, the thing might have been serviced recently or it might be rusted through almost completely and be hanging by a thread. Strange as it may seem, in a gale I would rather pick the third option which is anchoring.

Anchoring is one of those subjects which divides the sailing world. If you sail in the Solent there’s a fighting chance that you will never use an anchor; marinas or at a pinch, moorings provide all you need. But an anchor isn’t really a lifestyle choice, it’s an essential piece of safety equipment. The funniest radio exchange I ever heard was someone in a motor boat calling Solent Coastguard to say they had run out of fuel and could someone please come to help them? They were quite close to the Southampton shipping lane and drifting towards it so the Coastguard instructed them to anchor immediately. The answer that came back was: ‘Sorry, we have no anchoring facilities available at this time’. I assume the phrasing was because they were too embarrassed to simply state the fact rather than because they were expecting a Fedex delivery at any time but that just for the moment they were unaccountably fresh out of anchors. It’s a measure of the professionalism of the Coastguard that they continued to be polite although I’m sure I heard a sigh.

Going to sea without an anchor is not a good thing. In fact you’re meant to have at least two. Partly because you might lose one (done that), partly because if it gets really windy you might need to set both of them and partly because you might need to anchor both ends of the boat to stop it swinging. Snow Goose has three, the main one hanging off the bow can be dropped in about 30 seconds. The secondary anchor can be retrieved from the locker and put over the side in about two minutes. The third is stowed somewhere in the depths. I forget where exactly.

The concept of anchoring is that it should provide infinite flexibility. Stop wherever you want, throw over the hook and break out the sundowners. Unfortunately, as with so many things at sea, it’s not quite that simple. One of the main characteristics of an anchor is that it should be portable, unlike a mooring. Slinging a tractor tyre full of concrete under her bow would spoil Snow Goose’s rakish good looks and impair her sailing performance. It would also sink her.

No, an anchor has to be much lighter than the weight that holds a mooring in place. What that means is that you can’t just lower it down onto the seabed and go to bed. If you do, the boat will move smartly sideways with the wind or the tide while the anchor leaves a series of dots on the seabed as it leapfrogs after you. Anchors are designed to resist pull sideways, not straight up so you have to let out enough chain for it to describe a graceful curve down to the bottom and then along to the anchor so that the pull is along the seabed rather than up. In other words, the anchor and the chain form a partnership. A side benefit of this is that having lots of chain out acts as a shock absorber and takes out some of the snatch that you sometimes experience on a mooring. A length of chain three times the depth of the water is generally considered the minimum. You need far more in a gale or strong current. Snow Goose has 60 metres of chain which I reckon lets us see out a gale in 10 m of water.

So, not only do you need somewhere that is shallow enough for the chain you have available, the type of seabed is also important. Rock is dreadful. Either the anchor skitters across it or it gets jammed and you never get it back. Kelp is bad news too. It clogs up the business end of the anchor so that it can never get a grip. Very soft mud tends to just let the anchor ooze through it under strain. The best type of seabed is sandy mud or sand.

Then of course there’s the type of anchor. Anchors are like mousetraps; everyone thinks they can design a better one. For hundreds of years there was only one type of anchor, the sort you can see on the promenade of any seaside town or hanging from the bow of HMS Victory. This kind of anchor is very hard to stow on a small boat and so as yachting became popular along came a design that is one of those classics that retards development for a generation: the CQR anchor. Rumour has it that it was designed down the pub on the back of an envelope for a bet. The bet was for an anchor that could be easily stowed. The CQR fits that bill because it has a hinge between the head and the stock that allows it to lie flat on the deck. Unsurprisingly it also allows it to lie flat on the seabed and slide sideways rather than digging in. For some reason the CQR became the default anchor for almost all new boats, I suppose because it fitted neatly.

I got fed up with dragging a CQR in the feeblest of conditions and bought a new anchor, taking advantage of the leaps in design over the last ten years when numerous better types have been produced, all conspicuously lacking a hinge between the neck and the stock.

The truth of this was brought home just the other day when some friends (well they are now!) in a chartered boat considerably larger than Snow Goose (41’ as opposed to our 32’) were dragging their CQR. Rather than muck about trying to reset it they tied up alongside Snow Goose. Our anchor held the two boats comfortably.

The big difference between a mooring and anchoring is the length of chain connecting you to the bottom. It’s far longer for an anchor. What that means of course is that you swing in a far bigger circle as the wind or tide changes. If you have 40 m of chain out in 10 m of water, your swinging circle will be about 30 m whereas on a mooring it would less than 10. The extra swinging space needed is no problem in a large isolated anchorage. You can throw out as much chain as you like, it’s not doing any good in the locker. It’s when a small anchorage begins to fill up that it all gets interesting.

There’s a psychology to an anchorage similar to a railway carriage or a cinema. First person in is top dog and may look sniffily at the second person to arrive. Once a third person comes in, second person becomes a resident and can look sniffily at No 3 and so on. Pity the tenth person to arrive, frantically looking for a space with nine other boats being sniffy.

When an anchorage is crowded it’s essential that you:

• A) Don’t drag your anchor
• B) Don’t drop your anchor on top of someone else’s anchor or chain
• C) Position yourself so that you don’t swing into other boats as the wind or tide changes

Unfortunately A and C are often mutually exclusive. To avoid dragging you need lots of chain out which increases your swinging circle bringing you into conflict with others because not all boats swing in the same way. This leads to the dance of the yellow wellies in the middle of the night when the wind picks up. The name derives from the popular 80’s yachting footwear which is all you have time to put on when you leap from your bunk in the middle of the night to cope with a nightmare of tangled chains and clashing hulls. This kind of thing happens because someone has let out ten times too much chain or is using rope rather than chain. And don’t get me started on that!

So, picking an anchorage is easy. It must be sheltered from the wind you are expecting but still be ok if the forecast is completely wrong. It must be deep enough for you to stay afloat but shallow enough for the chain you have available. It must have the right sort of seabed and not be close to any cliffs (they cause horrendous squalls). And finally you must have an adequate anchor and be able to glare threateningly at any one who looks as if they’re going to come close – simple. Oh and it must have a good supply of Bog Myrtle.

---

31st July 2008

Since leaving Oban after getting everything fixed or replaced I’ve been cruising through the areas that I always had in mind when I started thinking about this trip.

My first obstacle when I’d cleared the Sound of Mull was the Point of Ardnamurchan. This headland which is said to be the most westerly point of mainland Britain has a fearsome reputation for big seas and squalls and looms large in the mind of anyone making this trip. I seem to have caught it on a good day and there was just enough wind to give me a splendid sail round to Loch Moidart.

The entrances to some of the Lochs along this coast are a little tricky to say the least with very narrow channels and rocks hidden just beneath the surface. With concentration it’s not a problem and that evening saw us anchored in a little bay cooking local mussels on an open fire and generally feeling at peace with the world.

A couple of days later I was in Arisaig, watching the sun set over Rhum and thinking about Local Hero.

If you don’t know the film then skip this bit because I headed north the next day to find Ben’s beach. One of my preconceptions was always that when I reached Local Hero territory I would have Local Hero weather, and so it turned out. Beautiful sunny and calm days. I might have found the exact beach, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter.

A couple of days later saw me making the crossing from Canna to Barra in the Outer Hebrides. There was just enough wind to keep us moving at an acceptable speed with the cruising chute up so I settled down for a long but sunny and relaxing passage

All of a sudden, off to starboard, a big fin. Basking shark! I’d seen one a couple of times before but always when it was raining or overcast. This would be the ideal opportunity to get a good view down into the water. I altered course and went over to have a really good look at it. As it happens I needn’t have been in such a hurry because on the passage from Canna to Barra I saw 42 basking sharks. I’m not sure what they were up to but it seemed to be some kind of ‘Shark-fest Canna 2008’; they were everywhere. For much of the trip I’ve been dodging lobster pot markers. Along the north coast of Canna I was dodging sharks.

And what amazing creatures they are. They filter feed by trolling round on the surface with their mouth wide open, sucking in whatever’s going. It’s a powerful reason for not chucking rubbish in the sea. They’re very docile and very large. Apparently they have a brain the size of a broad bean. I managed to get up alongside several and the largest I found was about 2m shorter than the boat; that’s an 8 m shark!

While they’re feeding, they look really odd because they open up their whole front end and have a mouth wider than the rest of their body. As they come towards you, all that’s visible is this big white gape of the inside of their mouth. It also does weird things to their nose which sort of hinges upwards into a bulbous blob a bit like an elephant seal or a proboscis monkey. The end result is something that looks as if it’s got a really big nose and is so bored it’s yawning!

But if they get fed up with me bumbling around them, they have a really neat trick. They close their mouth and flick their tail. Simple as that. The comical nose disappears, the yawn disappears and you’re left with….well…., an 8 m long shark. And all of a sudden I wouldn’t want to be in the water with them however harmless they’re ‘supposed’ to be.

While sidling up to sharks there was a constant hum of dolphins/porpoises (I’m not that good at telling them apart yet). On the whole they can take care of themselves, a bit like motorcycle couriers in a traffic jam. They love to play and dodge around the boat.

The sharks and dolphins were beginning to thin out and I was setting my sights on remote Barra when all of a sudden, several hundred metres off our port bow, something black and very large rose out of the water and then fell back with a big splash. Binoculars revealed lots of large rolling black shapes in the water. These I assumed were whales. My first of the trip which was dead exciting. They seemed to be quite big and since they appeared to be in the mood for jumping out of the water (possibly without checking what was above them) I thought it best to watch them from a distance. And very rewarding it was too. Dolphins are on the surface to breathe for about a second. Whales, being larger are visible for up to 5 seconds and often send up a jet of spray as they exhale.

I was watching them closely when a noise like a venting compressor from behind me revealed that everything on the port bow was a decoy to allow the comedian of the group to get close to me. About 30 m away on the starboard beam, something that looked about the size of a road tanker was curling through the surface and disappearing under the water, heading straight at me.

Now I’m very cool with dolphins going under Snow Goose. They’re encouragingly small and have a twinkle in their eye that suggests that they’re alert, paying attention and know what they’re doing. Plus, they’re packing state-of-the-art electronics.

Whales I’m not so sure about. To start with they’re enormous. Seriously big. Also, and I don’t mean to be rude, they have a somewhat vacant air to them. An, ‘I’m-a-lot-bigger-than-you-so-I-really-don’t-care-if-I-hit-you’ sort of attitude, which is not reassuring. I’m also not at all convinced that their sonar is up to snuff.

All of which passed through my head in the few seconds it took for this big bully to reach my poor little boat. I put down my binoculars, braced myself and mentally rehearsed my Mayday. Was ‘Whale-strike’ a valid term?

Suffice to say that I was mightily relieved when it emerged on the other side and I could unclench my buttocks. I don’t know by how much it missed me, but downwards visibility seems generally to be between 5 and 10 metres and I could see it VERY clearly as it passed underneath. Did it miss be by pure chance or did it know exactly what it was doing? I’m sure there’s an expert out there who’ll tell me. In the meantime, I feel as if I’ve ‘done’ whales.

Arriving in the Outer Hebrides was a significant moment for me because the name has always been synonymous with isolation and remoteness. I wasn’t disappointed and the last week has seen me able to indulge fully in my favourite pastime of taking Snow Goose into tiny little nooks and crannies for the night.

Some have been so small that I’ve needed two anchors to stop her from swinging if the wind were to change direction. The only drawback is that when surrounded by heather and bracken, the wind is stifled almost completely and the midges and flies tend to find you.

I’ve now reached the southern end of Lewis which is as far north as I’m going along the outer Hebrides. Tomorrow I shall cross back across the Little Minch to Skye and then work my way north up the mainland visiting some of the most famous names in British Geology: Loch Torridon, Stoer, Assynt, Inchnadamph and Durness to name a few.

Rubbish has been a problem for a while. When I was younger, most of the rubbish we created on a boat went over the side. Certainly tins and bottle and I suspect rather more plastic than was healthy. Such an approach seems barbaric when viewed in the light of today’s values and I even feel guilty throwing a used teabag overboard when ten miles offshore.

In Ireland it’s illegal to throw any rubbish at all overboard and they’re fully geared up for recycling. Unfortunately, in one of those amusing little quirks of eco-well-meaning, you need a car to get to most of the recycling centres. The poor old boat owner is left looking at a public waste bin on the quayside which has a grill over the opening so that you can’t put in anything larger than a crisp packet.

All of this means that the rubbish has to stay on the boat for some time and it brings you into real conflict with the food packaging industry. Why does everything have to come in a plastic tray? The shrink wrap is no problem, it can be easily rinsed and compressed, but the plastic tray? No chance. They don’t fold or compress they just take up huge amounts of room. Cardboard, while abundant is relatively benign and can be stood on to make it occupy less space. Not that this is without hazard. One can visualise a purely hypothetical situation where someone had bought two cardboard boxes of half a dozen eggs and was transferring the contents to a plastic, crush-proof egg box but was interrupted and distracted in the middle of the operation. You can imagine that it would be possible for him to forget which box he had emptied and which was still full and to stand on the full one to crush it for storage. Not that such a thing would ever happen to me.

---

23rd July 2008

Well, not entirely surprisingly, things have begun to break. I’ve had a long running engine problem with it overheating under certain conditions and nothing I did with the engine made any difference. It looked as if it was a problem with the fitting that draws in water for the cooling system.

Then the other day while changing headsail, a vital piece of the system which feeds the sail into the groove pinged out and disappeared smartly over the side. I watched it sink until it was out of sight.

But the most significant breakage has been the anchor chain! I was just bedding the anchor in one evening with a little bit of astern on the engine, when the anchor slipped and came up again with a slight shock. Then there I was motoring briskly astern with a broken chain and my anchor lost on the bottom. A quick look using mask and snorkel showed the bottom to be covered with kelp and the anchor and 10 m of chain completely invisible.

The next morning, after a night lying on the kedge anchor, I did the job properly with an aqualung and a circular search and to my great joy found it after about 20 mins. The chain had broken in two places and I’ve never heard of this happening to anyone before. The one link I managed to keep looks to me as if it hadn’t been welded properly. Anyone know of a firm of expert metallurgists who can help me with a recovery action against the manufacturers?

Anyway, all of that meant that a stop in Dunstaffange Marina just north of Oban let me order a part for the engine, a new feeder and another 60 m of chain since I don’t trust the old one anymore. Since that would all take a while to arrive I took advantage of the delay to circumnavigate Mull taking in Tobermory, Iona and all the wonderful scenery of the area.

I’ve just picked up the new chain and the boatyard lifted Snow Goose out of the water to fit the new water intake.

The new feeder has arrived and with all the work done I’m just setting off again to head north and round the notorious Point of Ardnamurchan. After that it rather depends on the wind, but I hope to visit Rhum and Canna and then head out to Barra and work my way up the Outer Hebrides before crossing back to the north coast of Skye.

Fingers crossed, that’s all my breakages are over because from here on boatyards become thin on the ground. So do barbers. Given my reception on Iona I might have to try a little trimming of my own.

---

14th July 2008

Well I’ve made it to Scotland and the upper end of Loch Tarbert on the west coast of Jura following a whistle stop tour of the Islay distilleries.

This is as remote and wild a spot as you could wish for and requires some splendid and slightly nerve-wracking pilotage to get into. I’m used to going through channels whose banks are narrower that the boat is long, but only when said banks are muddy, not hard and rocky as they are here.

Since Portrush, my peace and solitude have been blown away by the very welcome arrival of my son and two of his friends for a five day ‘holiday’. It’s come as something of a shock since not only are they very large (taking up a lot of room) and eat huge amounts of food, they have also in the manner of teenagers the world over, spread stuff everywhere.

Apart from the socks and sweet wrappers all over the floor, I’m amazed at the number of wires and the amount of electronic kit. We’ve got i-Pods, i-Phones, i-Trips, i-Stations and all sorts to feed the need for constant ‘music’ at all hours of the day. I say ‘music’ because of course there’s no tune you can hum and you can’t understand the words. Grumble grumble.

Anyway, it’s good to have some company and I’m very much enjoying the change. I’ve cleared away sufficient of the i-Mess to get at my computer and chart table to write a few words. Since leaving Portrush the weather has been kind, if not actually good. We had a beautiful sunny crossing to Islay and then only one day of rain and no gales at all, just stiff breezes although of course not always from the right direction.

At one point it was so sunny that I managed to persuade all three of them to jump in the water. I was amazed at how easy it was. I spoke eloquently and with feeling about global warming, the Gulf Stream and local warming effects in shallow water and in they went. It was fun watching the scramble for the ladder!

Anyway, apart from that there’s been a lot of sleeping to be done.

If you’ve been reading these pages you will have noticed that I have a thing about the wind, it’s strength and direction. Sailors are amazingly fussy creatures regarding the wind. Once we have a course to sail, we would like the wind to be blowing from just forward of the beam (the side) at about 20 knots. Now that’s not asking much surely.

If it blows from too far ahead then we can’t make our course and have to tack, which is fun but adds hours to the passage and so is tedious if you’re in a hurry. If it blows from too far aft (behind) then the sail is less exciting and you just get blown along in a passive, rolling sort of way. Of course if there is not enough wind then you don’t move fast enough and if there’s too much it all gets a bit too hairy. Snow Goose is a heavy boat and needs at least 15 to 20 knots to really get going.

All of that means that we generally like to know what the wind will be doing over the next few days so that we can plan our course. And this brings me to the subject of weather forecasting.

The fount of all knowledge is of course the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast, issued by the Meteorological Office and read out twice a day on FM and four times on Long Wave. It used to be four times a day on FM but they took away the handy ‘middle of the day’ slots leaving us with the ones that mean you have to get up at 5 am or stay up until 12 pm. I read somewhere that the London Underground map had won design awards and I would like to nominate the shipping forecast for a similar honour. It’s a masterpiece, with every word having a specific meaning to give you a firm idea of what will be happening in the next 24 hours. And the names of the areas; Everyone knows a few of them, whether it’s the mysterious North and South Utsire, the chilly sounding Southeast Iceland or the baffling German Bight.

And of course Finisterre (the end of the earth) has now gone, to be replaced by Fitzroy, the founder of the Met Office but also incidentally the Captain of the ship on which Charles Darwin made his world changing voyage to the Galapagos. There’s got to be a quiz question in that.

And then there’s the way it’s read. I think Radio 4 must have a special school where they send people to learn to read the shipping forecast. Even if you have no interest in sailing and are as far from the sea as you can get, the calm soothing tones are wonderful to listen to even if they are promising ‘Storm force 10 imminent’. Any fan of Black Books must remember Fran lying in bed listening to her old flame reading the forecast and ……well, yes enough of that.

Some of my earliest memories of sailing involve lying in a cosy bunk listening to the wind outside as the luckless skipper got up at stupid o’clock and hunched over the chart table listening to those beautifully modulated tones. On the basis of that forecast he would decide whether or not we would put to sea. I always remember it being a very ambiguous time. If it was ‘no’ I was pleased because I could stay in my bunk. But I knew that by 10 am I would be bored and wanting to move.

Sometimes the decision is easy. If a force 8 or above is mentioned then you’re not going, But what about 5-6 occasionally 7 later in the west? After four days sitting in a smelly French fishing port you even begin to see possibilities in a ‘Severe Gale 9’.

But the Shipping Forecast covers huge areas far out to sea and for coastal work there’s the Inshore Water Forecast which reaches to 12 miles offshore and includes a helpful 48 hour outlook. The Inshore Waters Forecast is issued by the Met Office and can be read on their website (as can the Shipping Forecast) but it is also read out by the Coastguard on the VHF radio. This is handy because you tend to find that you can pick it up anywhere. Well normally it’s handy but at the moment the Coast Guard are on strike. In Ireland, Met Eireann publish a similar forecast but they also publish a swell and wave forecast and a ‘small craft’ warning if things are getting interesting. This is read out by the Coast Guard but in a rather wonderfully relaxed manner compared to the UK. You can often hear someone making a cup of tea in the background or discussing local happenings. And the forecast is peppered with unofficial additions that make it well worth listening to.

But these are both summaries, covering big areas. You could easily fit England into Fitzroy and Ireland would happily slide up and to the left to nestle inside Rockall. Even the Inshore Waters Forecast areas are huge. Lyme Regis to the Isles of Scilly covers the south west of England. They have to do this because they only have a certain amount of space to publish the forecast so it has to be a summary of the whole area.

In order to get a bit more detail I have been using GRIB forecasts. GRIB models are what forecasters use to predict the weather. All weather information is fed into computers and the forecasts that are produced are then used and interpreted by all the national meteorologists who put together the forecasts. In other words, you can go back to the original, detailed information before it was summarised by someone. The program is free at www.grib.us and is also useful for planning holidays and church fetes.

The huge advantage is that if there is a gale in the offing in one corner of Fastnet, then that is what the forecast will say, but it leaves you wondering where exactly. GRIB tells you and sometimes lets you make significant decisions. When I was coming round Bloody Foreland from Aran to Sheeps’ Haven, Met Eireann had not yet lifted the previous westerly gale warning and had just issued a new southerly one. But GRIB told me that there would be a six hour window in our little area and that the new gale would not begin to wind up until 9 pm giving me plenty of time to slip round. And so it turned out. Whether such detailed forecasting can be trusted is of course another matter and if the warnings had been for northerly gales then I don’t think I would have chanced it. So far, apart from minor hiccups, GRIB hasn’t let me down, but I do need an internet connection to get to it. It also gives slightly speculative forecasts to five days ahead which are usually wrong in detail but right in broad outlook.

And of course the beauty of all these different forecasts? You can pick the one you most like the look of!

---

30 June 2008

I left Ipswich and then London with Northeasterly winds that blew me gently all the way to Brixham and then on into the West Country. One Gale came through while I was in Fowey, but apart from that the weather has treated me amazingly well. The last three weeks have seen me receiving my payback! It started as I made my way up from Valentia towards Kilrush.

I knew there was a gale coming so I found a nice sheltered spot and deployed my wonderful new anchor which never looked like budging throughout. Since then it’s been constant high winds with very occasional short breaks. It’s interesting being closely in touch with the weather and the synoptic chart at all times. You start to recognise the symptoms in the sky and re-learn all the ‘Red sky at night’ stuff. During the most severe gale so far, when I was holed up on the north side of Galway bay, it blew at up to 40 knots from the north east and then quite suddenly dropped away to a flat calm. As it happens I knew that it was because the centre of a small but particularly nasty depression was passing directly over me and sure enough, soon afterwards it blew even harder from the south west.

I managed to find one reasonable day to get round Slyne Head which opened up the more sheltered water from there north to Achill Head, including the Island of Inishbofin, the enormous cliffs of Clare Island and the wonderful steep-sided ‘fjord’ of Killary Harbour.

I was able to nip from place to place with Inishbofin and Clare Island taking the edge off the swells. This included a trip into Westport on the tide where I got the impression people thought I’d come from another planet.

Saturday and Sunday saw me complete two long, tricky legs, round Achill Head to Broad Haven and then the long, exposed passage north across Donegal Bay.

I’ve now reached Aran Island in the northwest corner of Ireland, where I’m going to have a day’s rest before tackling Bloody Foreland (all these headlands have such encouraging names). During the last three weeks I’ve confirmed three things I’ve been told about the west coast of Ireland (apart from the awful weather of course).

Firstly, it’s very remote and wild. I have seen two other sailing boats since I left the Shannon Estuary. One in the distance and the other on a mooring next to me in Broad Haven. We had a chat on the radio (it was too windy to shout) and both set off early the next morning. He went south and I went north. I felt quite sorry we were going in opposite directions. I could have done with some company. And that admission from someone who spends all his time on his boat trying to get away from other people is quite something!

There are quite a few houses dotted around the coast although I can’t help wondering what the people who live in them do. They can’t all be reclusive artists and authors. But there are also a number of very poignant derelict communities. Clusters of stone cottages with no roofs and blank doors and windows.

Most of my company has come from the sea birds of which there is an ample supply. To my delight, the one that seems to enjoy my company most is the Fulmar and it’s not often that one of them is not circling round the boat. I’ve never seen a Fulmar before and I rather like them in that anthropomorphising sort of way. They have a nice smile and lack the spiteful, bitter and twisted look of the Herring and Black backed gulls. They’re not as daft as the guillemots and puffins and not as stuck-up and full of themselves as the Gannets. To paraphrase Garry Larson, ‘Gannets know they’re cool’. No, Fulmars are the best; not flashy, just businesslike and efficient.

The second thing that I’ve confirmed is that the people who live here are every bit as friendly as I’d hoped. Whenever I stop by a village I blow up the dinghy, go ashore and have a wander around, drop into the local shop to see what I can make a meal out of and have a quick pint in a bar (of which there are many). You are never ignored and the enquiries as to your health and business are sincere and sometimes alarmingly involved! I’ve been driven back to someone’s house to fill up my cans with water and to have a shower and to a garage to fill up with diesel. I’ve even been picked up while pedalling my nearly-useless folding bicycle and driven to a nearby internet café to make contact with the outside world. I say internet café, but the local postmistress who must have been in her seventies was particularly into computers and was quite happy to let me use her connection provided I talked to her about what I was doing and about computers. Since my knowledge on the subject is patchy, I’m afraid I might have given her some rather suspect advice. Anyway it was a laugh perching on a stool in a corner of her post office having to explain what I was doing to everyone who came in.

But being remote and isolated doesn’t make the people here out of touch at all. I was invited to the pub the day after some nocturnal activities involving the transfer of my kedge (secondary) anchor and 40m of chain to a local boat that was dragging its own anchor (I got wetter during that little escapade than at any other time so far) and found the place to be a hotbed of political activity regarding the recent referendum rejection of the EU. Very heated and passionate and once again I had to do some serious bluffing to avoid looking like an uninformed yokel. I thought it was going to end in a fight but they all just wanted to get their point across by shouting loudest.

The third thing that I have confirmed to my complete satisfaction is that the west Irish seas are every bit as impressive as I’ve been led to believe. I’m used to waves; everyone is. They appear when the wind blows and go away again when it stops. Sometimes they get short and nasty and local effects such as underwater obstructions and tidal streams can make them uncomfortable and dangerous. But on this coast there are the grand fathers of the sea, the Atlantic swells. Swell is a different beast all together and is the result of a much longer term effect involving steady winds and long fetches for the sea to build up. It’s more of a rise and fall with a longer wavelength than the shorter-term, wind-driven waves. The only time I’ve encountered the swell with little or no wind it was really impressive because without any waves to complicate the surface you could watch areas of the sea the size of half a rugby pitch marching sedately towards you with their crests considerably higher than the boat. They’re not a problem because the boat rides peacefully over them and down the other side.

When it gets windy then everything is more complicated. For a start there are lots of wind-driven waves running around over the surface of the swell and usually not travelling in the same direction. Then they start to interfere with each other, often positively so that everything gets bigger until the crests are not only taller than the boat but quite a bit of the mast as well. The interference makes everything get shorter as well so that getting up over them is more of a problem.

Sailing into the seas is not a problem at all; in fact it’s great fun. You put up the right amount of sail to give the boat plenty of power without straining it and then steer up and over the waves. The climbing and swooping sensations as you go up them and down the other side are wonderful and each wave is a challenge to pick the best line to allow you to negotiate it without any of it coming aboard.

Going across them is fun too, although it’s a slightly more rolly motion and not to everyone’s taste. You just have to get used to the fact that as you slide sideways down the back of the wave, you’ve just climbed you will come upright when the next one starts to lift you.

It’s when the seas are coming from behind that life gets really interesting. This is when you have to travel in the same direction as the wind as I did last Sunday on my 12 hour passage north across Donegal Bay. Combined with a 20-25 knot following wind, this provided me with my biggest and most exciting seas so far and a thoroughly satisfying and fulfilling day. I shall also admit to a slight tension and stomach-knotting sensation at the beginning before I had the measure of them and at the end when I was tired and everything started to pile up on Aran Island.

The first thing I did when I left Broad Haven was have a bit of a play. I took down all the sails, lashed the tiller in the middle and just sat there. It was quite sedate, I just floated there and bobbed up and down on the waves. It wasn’t even that uncomfortable. Then I put the sails back up again and hove-to. That’s a sort of thing where you oppose the two sails and let the boat drift gently at an angle to the wind. I’ve done it a lot in other settings but never in anything quite this grand. It was marvellous. More comfortable than just sitting there and just as safe. With those two experiments under my belt and with the safe harbours of Killala and Sligo bays on an easy course to the east I set off in earnest.

The trick about sailing downwind in these conditions is not to look back (it’s scary) and to get the speed of the boat just right. Waves look bigger when you look at the front, downwind side. It’s steeper than the back and often has a lacing of white water along the top. If you look back (and up!) you see these things coming towards you and it often seems quite impossible that you will climb over them. But you do, so it’s better not to bother yourself by looking at them.

The speed is the important bit. If you have too much sail up then as the wave lifts you up and you reach the crest you get the full force of the wind (down in the trough you’re slightly sheltered) and shoot forward too fast so that you start running down the front of the wave. This is not good because when you reach the bottom, the bow stops (it’s hit the water) and the stern keeps going. Inevitable result is that you slew round sideways in the trough just as the wave comes down on top of you. If you’re a real adventurer you can work it so that instead of slewing round to the side (known as broaching) you flip over in a sort of nautical somersault with the stern falling over the bow. This is known as pitchpoling and is generally to be avoided because it breaks all the crockery and upsets the watch below. I have absolutely no intention of ever being anywhere near conditions where it might happen.

If you’re going too slowly, which is more common, then a sort of opposite happens. You reach the crest as the wave lifts you but then there is not enough power in the sails to pull you forward ‘up’ the back of the wave as it passes. The result is that you feel as if you’re sliding down the back of the wave, the bow points higher into the air than you would believe possible so you think you’re going to fall out of the back, the speed of the boat drops to almost nothing and you stall. There’s no way on the boat so however much you waggle the tiller around, you can’t steer. Now, remember that bit about never looking back? Should you stall in the manner described, you might care to glance astern and you will see that the wave off which you have just fallen is not alone. It has many, many friends, one of which is now approaching your stationery boat very fast and from the back; the part of the boat not designed to receive large waves. The end result is curiously similar to broaching, you end up with the cockpit full of water (pooped) and the boat sideways to the waves flapping about like a stranded fish.

If you get it right then the sensation is magnificent. The stern rises, you reach the crest and sit there as the sails fill tight and pull you forward just enough to surf briefly on the front of the crest and then to settle down the back of the wave on a virtually even keel ready for the next one to lift you and push you forwards again. Every now and again, with skilful steering you can do this without deviating from your course. It’s a wonderful ride that you would spend a fortune to achieve at a theme park. But it never feels entirely safe. There’s a sort of knife-edge, skateboard type balancing act feeling about the whole thing that makes it tiring and almost impossible to relax. In fact it’s far more stable than it feels. It just takes a while to develop the confidence to realise it. Boats have what’s called a ‘hull’ speed which is a theoretical maximum speed regardless of how much power you apply. Snow Goose’s is about 7 knots. When you’re surfing, hull speed doesn’t apply and on most waves we surfed at between 8 and 9 knots with a maximum of 10.5.

The changeover from going too fast to just right to too slow is not like an on/off switch. There are degrees. You get warnings before the big one. I never tried the ‘going too fast idea’ – didn’t appeal, and spent most of the trip just about right. Towards the end of the day, the wind began to pick up and I was getting tired so I hove to and put in a reef to reduce the sail area. As it turns out it wasn’t a good tactic. I did two of the ‘pointing up in the air and nearly falling out the back’ things and on the second occasion I heard this spiteful hissing from behind and turned in time to see a wave climbing up the sloping stern on the boat and depositing about 10 gallons of water in the cockpit (that’s not much if you were wondering, the cockpit could hold as much as one of those old Victorian baths with feet). But I didn’t broach and with the warning heeded, shook out the reefs and continued the fairground ride.

I’m now very firmly shackled to a mooring which looks as if the QE 2 could hang on it. After two long days, the last one with Snow Goose balanced on a skateboard for most of it I’m staying here for two nights before pressing on.

---

11 June 2008

One of the major hurdles on the trip is now behind me and that's the crossing from Cornwall to The Isles of Scilly and then on to Ireland. I've had the able assistance of Ira Harris and Richard Fletcher for the last week to help me because the crossing to Ireland in particular is too long to be done safely alone.

Setting off from Cornwall there's a dearth of good harbours close to Land's End. Falmouth is excellent but still a long way off and neither Penzance nor Newlyn are particularly welcoming to leisure users. There's a very active fishing industry and in fact someone we met in Scilly said that they'd had a horrible time in Newlyn and had been constantly harassed by fishing boats.

The only other, little known option is to spend the night in the harbour at St Michael's Mount in Mounts Bay. This is a major tourist attraction with a magnificent castle perched on the top of the mount. The whole place is cut off from the mainland at high tide. There is a tiny harbour that dries out completely at low tide, but with twin keels that’s not a problem so we touched down for the night in a particularly magnificent setting.

The following morning had one of those weather forecasts which made it difficult to decide. It was mostly force 6 (22 to 27 knots) but with occasional force 7 (28 to 33 knots) which is on the uncomfortable side. The sea state was described as 'Very rough in the west'. However, a more detailed weather chart suggested that the strongest winds would be out to the west of the Isles of Scilly so I decided to go for it. In the end it was rough but bearable and with the tide behind us we were moored in St Mary's Harbour by 2.30 pm just as the rain began and the wind really got going.

We had better weather for our crossing to Ireland and once we had cleared the shallow waters of the Isles of Scilly the sea smoothed out a little and we enjoyed a wonderful sail. We split ourselves into two watches, one from 10.00 pm to 2.00 am and the other from 2.00 am onwards. That way we all got some decent sleep.

Sailing at night is something that many people hate doing but it has always rather appealed to me. It's exciting because it's different and in good weather the stars are unbelievable. In the right conditions you also get magnificent phosphorescence. This is the bioluminescence given off by tiny plankton in the water which light up when they’re agitated. The passage of the boat therefore leaves a trail of angry plankton which glow furiously at our passing leaving a fiery trail of light in the turbulent water of our wake.

The other types of light that are all-consuming are those of ships. Ships at night are slightly more of a menace because it's very difficult to judge distance and to know for sure what they're doing. However, over the years, a simple but effective system of lights has been developed to help. Everyone shows a red light on the port side and a green light on the starboard side. These are visible from the side and from ahead but not from behind. Small boats also show a single white light above them. Large ships show two white lights with the one on the bow being lower than the one on the stern. Everyone shows a white light facing back. So if out to starboard you see two white lights, one above the other with a red light on the right and a green light on the left it means that a large ship is coming straight towards you and you'd better move! On the other hand, if dead ahead you see a red light with a low white light on the left and a high white light on the right it means that the ship is passing from right to left ahead of you and you're in the clear. If you see a single white light, you don't know what it is but it doesn’t matter because it's going away from you.

Simple. Well, yes and no. In the first place, the deck and working lights on large ships usually make the navigation lights difficult to see and secondly, as with all these systems there are then lots of special cases. There are different combinations of reds, greens, yellows and whites for pilot vessels, dredgers, trawlers, tugs towing oil rigs and submarines. On this passage we came across a collection of almost stationary red, green and white lights with a flashing orange light on the top. Never did find out what it was, just stayed well clear!

Having reached Cork and left Richard and Ira to the mercy of Ryanair I set off to continue west, only to run into a fisherman's blockade at the mouth of Cork Harbour.

They were protesting at the price of fuel and I was told politely that I could not leave. Having seen this kind of thing in France I knew better than to argue and since the weather was good I made all the usual protestations and then anchored nearby. I was obviously getting on their nerves because a couple of hours later one of them came over and told me I could leave. All done very pleasantly, so I hope they get what they need. I have considerable sympathy for them because it's an incredibly hard way to earn a living.

My next hurdle is to head west until I reach Mizzen Head after which I can turn north up the west coast of Ireland.

---

02 June 2008

It's nearly three weeks since I set off and I've reached Falmouth in better time than I could have hoped.

I've spent four days exploring this enormous estuary, from St Mawes in the east to Penryn in the west and as far north as Truro.

I've treated myself to a stay in Falmouth Marina, to fill up with fuel, water and food, to do my laundry and to meet a couple of old friends who live in the area. This is where I pick up Ira and Richard who are going to help me to sail to the Isles of Scilly and then on to Cork. This involves some overnight passages which I can't do alone. We hope to set off on Tuesday 3rd June.

I've had many e-mails from friends asking me how I'm getting on and the answer is 'absolutely fine so far'. As predicted, three weeks have gone in a flash and I've been having a great time finding out how to handle Snow Goose on my own. At sea there's really not too much of a problem, partly because I have a secret crew member in the shape of George. George is my autopilot which steers the boat on a set course until I tell him otherwise. He's considerably better than some human helmsmen! I don't know why autopilots are always called George, they just are and with him in control I'm free to navigate, adjust the sails and make a cup of tea.

Harbours and anchorages have been a mixed bag. On the whole anchoring is proving no problem at all and my back which was grumbling, is standing up to the strain of pulling up all that chain. However, I am beginning to review my previously hard line stance on electric anchor windlasses! Picking up moorings is OK on the whole, but I do miss having a crew. Normally one sends a liveried deck hand (or failing that a son or daughter) up to the bow with a boat hook and then approach the buoy slowly using the engine to counter any wind or current. They grab the buoy with the hook - job done. They even get their hands filthy on the weed and muck instead of me having to do it. It's all a bit more of a pantomime on my own involving leaving the tiller at the last minute and dashing forward to find the buoy just sliding out of reach as a cross wind blows the bow to the side. So far I've always made the pick up and I have various contraptions to help, but it all takes a bit longer.

Mooring alongside pontoons in marinas and towns is also considerably harder on your own and sometimes impossible. However, it's very rare that there’s nobody around to help and if by any chance there isn't anyone – then there's no one to watch me make a complete mess of it. The main discovery is that everything has to be planned in far greater detail and everything takes longer to get ready on my own. I really miss simply saying 'Warps and fenders please' and having six fenders magically appear on the side of the boat with someone holding a mooring line on the bow and stern ready to tie us up alongside.

Domestically I've settled in completely. I've been gradually adjusting where I have everything stowed according to how often I might need it combined with how urgently I need it when I do. Boats, like any confined space require you to move things to get at other things and then put it back again afterwards so that the place remains reasonably tidy. Anyone who's ever been into my office might find this surprising but I can actually be quite tidy.

Catering has gone well and I'm adjusting to life without a fridge. It's quite difficult cooking for one because by the time you've added a bit of this and a bit of that you almost always have enough for two. Since I have no fridge I've adapted by rediscovering the art of bottling. I make enough for four and then eat one and bottle the rest. So far I haven't poisoned myself and yesterday I ate something I bottled in Brixham two weeks ago. I've also got a good supply of bottled butter that I made before leaving. Among the vegetables I'm finding that potatoes and onions are no problem and that cauliflower and spring onions keep well. Fruit, particularly apples and oranges tends to be fine.

I'm topping up with local wildlife and so far my pelagic haul consists of several mackerel and a larger fish that I couldn't identify but which tasted fine. On the less mobile front I've had several helpings of local mussels, some cockles and lots of crabs that were too small to eat. No lobsters yet!

I don't think I've gone completely feral yet or let my standards slip too much. I may not be shaving every day And I'm sure in the politest society I might occasionally hum a bit, but I'm not letting the lack of a shower get me down and one of the advantages of picking out of the way spots to stay the night is that I don't have to consider the neighbours when I get out my bucket for a bath! I'm still drinking from a wine glass rather than a mug and of course I still use the butter knife.

I must have a tidy up and a quick flick round with a duster before the others arrive. It'll be strange having someone to talk to.

---

26 May 2008

London to the Southwest.

Well I got away from St Katharine's without banging into the lock, getting the large plastic bag (conveniently left by someone) round the prop, or crashing into the huge crowd of Dutch boats that had arrived purely to make my life difficult.

There was a lovely sunset behind Tower Bridge and the river was nearly empty so there was plenty of time to reflect, my dominant thought being 'What have I got myself into here!'

The Thames at night is not much fun so I stopped as it got dark next to a trot of enormous barges which groaned and crashed all night as they tugged against their mooring. Off early the following morning to catch the tide out of the Thames. Tides favour someone taking my route because the ebb takes you out of the Thames in time to catch the flood at North Foreland which in turn takes you round the corner to Dover. A whole 12 hours of favourable current. Since it runs at a couple of knots at its peak, it makes a huge difference.

The wind got up from the northeast in the mouth of the estuary giving a really good beat into rising seas off the north Kent coast. It was good to be moving fast at that point because one of the hazards in the Medway estuary is the wreck of the Richard Montgomery. She's a ship that was bringing ammunition to Britain in the last years of the Second World War and she ran aground and broke her back. There was quite a bit going on at the time (D-Day being the main event) and other than removing the ammunition that was readily off-loadable, not a lot was done about her. She just sat there under water with only her masts poking out as successive governments got on with more important things. There was an article about her in the New Scientist a few years ago and it seems that the cargo is now too unstable to move and, in theory at least, could go off at any moment. There's far too much to set off in a 'controlled' explosion and they reckon that if she does blow up the blast will flatten most of Sheerness and send a 5 m high wave up the Thames to London. Anyway, I always hold my breath as I go past. If you're in Southend looking at Kent and there's a huge white flash in the distance - hide.

A little further out and there’s another reminder of the Second World War in the shape of the Red Sands Towers. The Luftwaffe used to use the Thames Estuary as a marshalling point and then fly up the river to bomb London so they built a number of groups of towers to hold anti-aircraft guns. Red Sands is one of the largest and still sits there like a collection of Martian tripods from the War of the Worlds.

A few miles past the towers and it was time to turn to the south. As the wind came behind, everything calmed down slightly and I picked up the south going flood tide and shot down the channel on the inside of the Goodwin Sands and then round to Dover. You have to pay attention around the Goodwins, they bite. The list of vessels that have come to grief in these waters goes on and on.

I know the south coast fairly well and wanted to move along it as quickly as possible to get into waters that were less familiar. Moving quickly depends on having a suitable amount of wind from the right direction. Too much and you have to seek shelter, too little and you have to motor (noisy, expensive and boring). If the wind's blowing from the direction you want to go, it's no good at all (more on upwind sailing in a later edition). The prevailing winds are from the southwest and so I was not anticipating a rapid journey.

In the days before I set off from Ipswich to London I was watching the weather and wondering if the northeasterlies would hold for long enough to get me down there. They did. The weather was then fine for leaving London and as I rounded South Foreland to Dover, the wind and the forecast was still northeasterly force 5. Ideal. And so it continued, against all the trends and my own record for getting favourable winds, which frankly is not good. I ended up in Brixham earlier than I could have dared to hope. Then as I settled in for a day’s rest the fog came down, the heavens opened and it poured with rain all day, just when I didn't want to go anywhere. I couldn't have asked for a better chain of events.

At that stage I thought I had used up my allowance of good weather luck for the entire trip but it was not to be. Those northeasterlies stayed with me giving me some storming days sailing round to Dartmouth and then on to Salcombe, Plymouth and Fowey where I'm writing this during a day of rain and gales.

Several things strike me about the Southwest. There are loads of rocks everywhere! We don’t really have rocks on the east coast, just sand and mud. Rocks are definitely a new thing and are a great deal harder than what I’m used to so I’m giving them plenty of respect. The scenery that goes with them is a welcome change to the flat lands of the Essex and Suffolk marshes and the steep wooded valleys that I can sail up for the night are impressive and beautiful.

Sadly the second thing that strikes me is the empty feeling in my wallet. They really know how to charge down here. Back home you can drop the anchor or pick up a spare mooring for the night and settle down with no further thought. Here, you are met at the entrance by a vulture in a launch (well I was at Salcombe. At Dartmouth they waited until I was stationary before swooping) and money is extracted just for being there. And it's not trivial. I don't mind paying a bit for the upkeep of a mooring it I use it, but ten quid for using my own anchor seems unreasonable. I'm told it's for harbour dues which given what I'm being charged at Fowey would work out at four and a half thousand pounds a year, way above what the locals are charged, so that argument doesn't really wash. Anyway there's no getting away from them, they find you however inconspicuous you try to make yourself – I suspect CCTV and boat recognition software.

My plans are to head on to Falmouth when the weather improves where I hope to spend a week exploring the estuary. Then I shall pick up two friends for the long overnight passages to the Isles of Scilly and then Ireland. Thatss when I really need settled weather. Can my luck hold for just two more weeks?

---

23 April 2008

Every year I promise myself that I will put the halyards back inside the mast in March rather than leaving it to the last minute. Every year I end up doing it over the last weekend before launching.

One thing about boats is that when you put them in the water, large parts of them become inaccessible. They divide into two areas, those under the waterline such as the prop, rudder and skin fittings. These are the valves (sometimes called seacocks) that allow things to pass through the hull. This includes the inlet for the engine cooling water and the heads and the outlets for the sink, basin and ...heads. The other area that's difficult to reach once the boat's afloat is everything that's up the mast. You can climb it to replace the masthead light bulb but it's much easier to do when the mast is lying down. This is particularly true this year because there's just been a recall on the type of bosun's chair I have. Apparently the stitching is coming undone and if that happens when you're at the top of the mast it can be embarrassing.

Anyway, I digress. Every autumn I remove the halyards from the mast and take them home for a good wash and warm, dry winter storage. They run inside the mast which is a 13 m long hollow aluminium tube and in order to replace them you need to leave a length of string, known as a mouse, in their place. When it's time to replace them, simply tie the halyard on to the mouse and pull it back into the mast - simple.

Unfortunately, as every electrician who has used the same technique to pull cables will tell you, things often get stuck. Worst of all, the mouse can break or part company from the halyard leaving you in big trouble. It doesn't often go wrong, it's just that if it does, the consequences are fairly dramatic and usually involve some money. It's one of those jobs for which I can never decide if it's better to have help or to do it alone. It's definitely easier with someone at either end of the mast, but you really do have to trust them not to pull on the wrong piece of string and cause the mouse to slip merrily down its hole and into the mast.

Everything went fine this year with the exception of the main halyard. For some reason it got halfway in and then stuck. I just could not work out what it was sticking on because in theory there should be no obstructions in the middle of the mast. It went in eventually but I still don't know why. No doubt I'll find out later in the season when the halyard breaks during a gale.

Launching is not a particularly dignified operation. They pick Snow Goose up in a big sling and then drive her down to the crane quay.

Then when the tide is right she's hoisted up and lowered into the water. The first thing that happens is an almighty scramble as someone gets down into the cabin to check that there are no holes left open to the sea. There have been cases of people removing a skin fitting in the autumn in order to repair or replace it and then completely forgetting to put it back before launching. It's considered bad form to have a boat sink next to the crane quay.

Once afloat, the mast follows, being lowered down by the crane and guided into its step by the riggers waiting on the deck. With the base firmly located in the tabernacle the various bits of wire that keep it upright are attached and tightened. Snow Goose has what's called a 'fractional rig' and the mast is kept up by the forestay which stops it falling over backwards and then two sets of shrouds that stop it falling sideways or forwards. The backstay, which on some rigs prevents the mast from falling forwards, is there to allow the correct amount of curvature to be introduced to the mast. Once that's all tightened up, we're ready to go.

---

8 April 2008

Last weekend was meant to see me complete the spring ritual of every boat owner - antifouling. If you leave a boat in the sea with just a bare hull, within a few weeks it will have grown a rich variety of marine life including weed, barnacles corals and anything else that thinks it can increase drag and slow you down. The Orwell is a particularly 'dirty' river in the sense that it is very fertile and by the autumn, the underwater parts of the boat would resemble the hanging gardens of Babylon if it wasn't for antifouling paint.

This paint must be applied every spring and it then wears away during the summer so that anything that has attached itself falls off with it. It's known as eroding antifouling. It also has numerous nasty things in it that animals and weed don't much like in the first place. I should have got it done by now but as you can see from the photo the weather had other ideas.

One serious decision has been made and that involves the engine. A thorough inspection last autumn showed that one of the two cylinders had given up completely. This meant either a complete rebuild or a new engine. I have eventually bitten the bullet and gone for the latter. The price difference is not colossal and the new engine comes with a new alternator, gearbox and controls. I hope it will give far better performance and peace of mind. Teething problems? What are they?

Of course you can't do something like this without Sod's Law coming into action. The new engine turns the propeller shaft the other way meaning I also need a new propeller. I did wonder about leaving on the old one and trying to remember that I had to pull the lever back to go forward and forward to go back. However, I'm fairly sure that at some moment of high drama I'd forget and ram something hard and spikey so a new prop it is. It should have been delivered some time ago and I'm assured it will arrive soon. I'm not at all nervous - there's a whole two weeks before Snow Goose goes into the water. Lots of time... no really.

---

March 2008

Snow Goose spends the winter months on dry land tucked up under a cover and there's no denying that she's a mess at the moment. The winter is always a time for repairs and other work and it leaves things messy and untidy. I've taken all the windows out because I need to replace the perspex which had crazed so badly in the sunlight that you could barely see through them. They are also badly weakened and it's just possible some large lumps of water will be hitting them and I would rather keep them on the outside. The engine also needs a considerable amount of work on it with a tricky decision about whether to replace or recondition.

The boat is capable of swallowing the most amazing amount of gear and supplies and I try to take it all out when she's laid up in the autumn. Otherwise it sits there damp and sweaty throughout the winter and has usually seized up by the following spring.