We slipped the lines in the first hour of Saturday
morning and headed out into the Solent. As we reached the Jack in the Basket beacon we
turned left, started motoring
east and immediately hit 2.5kts of foul
tide. Although it was expected (we had decided
to just get going rather than wait for it to turn) it slowed our progress to
3.5kts. Watching the streetlights of
Ryde drift past at walking pace took some of the sparkle out of the
adventure. Spaniel decided to deal with
the frustration by going to bed.
Boat Mood: Hopeful
At 3am I roused her, kicked her out of her nice warm
cocoon and climbed in myself. When I
woke it was dawn and we were approaching Selsey Bill. The tide had turned – we were making 6kts and
all was right with the world. It was at
this point that S. got sick. She stayed
sick for twelve hours –all day. She got
so bad at one point that she finally accepted the advice to go and lie down in
the cabin and she slept again.
It’s a funny thing sea sickness, (which is another way of
saying it’s not funny at all if you are suffering it) the one place that you’d
really think to avoid when you have it – turns out to be the only place on the
boat you can get any relief. It can be
so debilitating that one can sleep for a whole day just to shut it out.
Time: Midday
Position: Beachy
Head
Crew on deck: Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Keeping On
I’m alone in the cockpit.
All other crew are in bed resting, or sleeping through a nasty bout of
seasickness. I start spooking myself
with thoughts of falling overboard unnoticed.
The sea is not dangerously cold, but we are five miles offshore and I
never actually got my 10m badge. I
wonder what the chances are of being rescued by dolphins. I reckon they are
about the same as being rescued by a unicorn. No unicorn has ever been seen this far off
Beachy Head – and certainly not swimming.
Can they even swim? I’m delirious
with hunger evidently.
I move back into the cockpit, consider putting on a
harness and then instantly forget about it as I notice there is still a
fun-pack of sweets in the sweet bag. Safety is my top priority after Maltesers.
Time: Dusk
Position: Lydd
Crew on deck: Head Cook
Spaniel
Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Moved
Is there any more
beautiful sight than sunset over Dungeness Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor? If there is I’m sure I’ve never seen it. You
can keep your Inca City of Machu Picchu, and your Halong Bay. When you have seen the sky lit up from the
steady glow of several trillion irradiated Krill hovering just beneath the
surface of the sea and basking in the warmth of the power station discharge
pipe, then you have gazed upon Man’s works at their majestic finest.
The sight makes me wonder whether
the Ready Brek kid ever grew to adulthood. He’s never mentioned on ITV anymore.
Perhaps they have him locked in a basement plugged into the national grid
and earning them a feed-in tariff.
With the Main up, as it had been since lunchtime, the
motion of the boat improved and when Spaniel climbed the stairs to the
cockpit it was evident she was feeling a lot better. She took the helm. In this case ‘taking the helm’ meant sitting at
the back of the boat and looking at the wheel as the autopilot was driving and
we crew were just hanging around like teenagers in a bus stop – aimless but
with no place else to go.
Spanna helmed until 21:00 when she decided that she needed a
sleep. All of the determined sleeping that
she had done up to that point had worn her out and she now needed a proper rest
to recover. So with the helmsman in bed
and the Cooklet in bed (where he had been with seasickness for eighteen
hours) running the boat was left to the Head Cook (who was also the Skipper)
and me – part-time navigator and occasional sail-trimmer. We lay a course for Dover which we could see
from 20 miles away, and waited the four hours it took to get there.
Time: Midnight
Position: Dover
Crew on deck: Head Cook
Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Transient
The ferry, as it moved across our bows, threw off enough
light to illuminate the whole boat. I snapped off a couple of photos
using the night mode of my camera – all the better to illustrate the fearsome
size of the thing as seen from the deck of a tiny yacht two miles off Dover in
the middle of the night.
I’d reckoned without the Cloaking Device that
they all now apparently employ. The
pictures came out almost completely black with just a single illuminated pixel
somewhere in the frame to indicate the presence of a 30,000 tonne steel monster
traversing our path.
We were on the radio – talking to Dover Port
Control.
“Er... Hi Dover,
we’re the yacht making our way up from the South West that you can probably see
on your radar...”
“What? Which yacht? ... Hold on a minute...”
There followed the sound of a doughnut hurriedly being
put down and some spectacles being searched for.
“South West you
say?”
“Yes – about a mile
off the South West entrance and a mile off-shore.”
“No. There’s nothing on our radar. Are you sure it’s Dover you’re abeam?”
“Yes. We can see The Pride of Skegness standing off
and giving us sea room.”
“Wait – let me turn
up the gain a bit... yes, there you are!
Sorry I thought you were a biscuit crumb on my screen. I can see you now.”
“Yes that’s us.” (A miserable speck, adrift on a huge expanse of water,
travelling at walking pace across the entrance to Britain’s busiest port.)
“Keep an eye out Sir,
for Ocean’s Leviathan. She is
approaching you from the left. Nothing
to worry about though Sir - she weighs 40,000 tonnes. Her paint is thicker than your hull. If you hit her you’ll do her no damage at
all.”
I looked over the port rail and lost a little colour from
my cheeks. There she was, throbbing with menace like an angry multi-storey car
park and bearing down upon us at 30kts.
There is no problem so bad it can’t be improved by the
addition of a cup of tea. I left the
cook to it, and hurried below to put the kettle on.
When I returned with the tea ten minutes later the
ferries were gone.
“How did that go?”
I asked, unable to keep a note of concern from underscoring my words.
“Oh no problem,” said
the head cook, “They altered course by
30ยบ and went round us, then Dover sent the lifeboat to guide us out of
their territorial limits. They’ve just left in a real hurry. You can see them to the south” and he
gestured over his shoulder without looking round.
I looked where he pointed and could see the navigation
lights of the inshore rescue vessel. There was a huge rooster-tail plume of
water thrown up behind by the twin supercharged marine engines. The boat was moving very fast away from us.
“Really?” I
said, “How come?”
“I’m not sure to be honest.” said the cook, “I think I had a waking dream that we were a BBC
film crew sailing with Timothy Spall. I got on the radio and told them we were getting tired and
thinking of coming in to Dover for the night.
That’s when they went a bit funny, closed the harbour gates and sent the lifeboat.”
He took the mug of tea and went off watch downstairs for a sleep.
I rested my back against the bulkhead and looked out into the night. The sea was calm, the
winds were no more than a breeze and the moon was full overhead. It lit a bright safe highway across the sea upon
which we travelled. We followed it to
Ramsgate.
Time: Dawn
Position: Harwich
Crew on deck: Cooklet
Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Foggy
Daybreak saw us clear of the
Goodwin Sands, and entering the Orwell at Harwich. Loosely following the prescribed yacht route,
we weaved from Cardinal to Cardinal, returning to the cockpit occasionally to straighten
the wheel and look for the next buoy.
The majority of the rest of
the time was spent head-down, hammering at a clutch trying to persuade it to let
go the main halyard and allow the sail to fall.
No doubt it was this abject
failure to pay attention to what was forward of us that allowed us (Cooklet
having risen from his grave after a near perfect 31 hours) to run headlong into a fog bank
just as the river narrowed.
“No problem,” he said, ” I have
this!” and he pulled an air horn from his secret stash of emergency aural
warning devices.
“Are you sure that’s the
correct signal for a motoring yacht?” shouted the Skipper from his bunk as his
junior issue played Colonel Bogey from the cabin roof. I watched on the radar as a swarm of small
fishing craft scattered around us in the gloom.
Time: Morning
Position: Orwell
Crew on deck: Head Cook
Cooklet
Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Entranced
We cleared the mist with no more than a couple of potentially
fatal avoided collisions and the sky opened up into an inspiring early morning
scene. Cooklet successfully avoided the temptation to deploy his fog horn through Spaniel's cabin window (despite significant encouragement from me) and instead we stood in cheerful silence watching the scene slip by.
Growing up as I did with “Along the River” a show about a
bloke paddling his canoe up a river, (doesn’t sound so great now I admit – but I
was 5 at the time and easily pleased) I was captivated. We saw wading birds, early morning
fishermen (those that hadn’t been thrown from their boats by our wake) Gannets,
River Dolphins, A Buffalo and even a couple of Mammoth. Actually, looking back on that list now – I wonder
if I wasn’t suffering from a small amount of sleep deprivation, but it was a beautiful moment.
We spent the next stunning half
hour slowly motoring up- stream - past Pin Mill, under the huge span of the
Orwell Bridge, and past my favourite pair of gently rusting trawlers – (boomed off
to prevent any further pollution, and sinking day by day into the ooze) We were heading
for a berth at the Yacht Haven: a shower, a change of clothes and a huge fry-up
from the marina restaurant. Thirty minutes later we had them all.
Time: Lunch
Position: Ipswich
Crew on deck: Spaniel
Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood: Complete
At rest, engine off, power on. We'd put no new marks on her, killed no other
sentient being and inflicted no permanent damage on ferries or any other
craft. We could not have made the journey
without the Cook and the Cooklet who systematically failed to feed us but who
brought us all home safely, quickly and confidently. They showed us how to run a passage properly
and were fine teachers to poor students.
They were magnificent, and we are very grateful.
GB-SUE tugged gently at her lines as she settled
comfortably into her new home. Spaniel and I toasted the cooks, the boat, and each other with champagne
and then went for a snooze to wait for the pubs to open.
Bow Thrusters are fitted to help large yachts and ships move the sharp-end sideways. Big boats often have them incorporated into the design, but it is possible to have one retro-fitted by someone with a big drill bit and a talent for working with fibreglass. 
GB-SUE makes her home in a double-finger berth - she has pontoons on both sides of her. Getting her settled in is similar to reversing a five-tonne motorised shopping trolley uphill across an ice rink and into a single garage. Most attempts end with her resting sideways across the entrance. She does this without the aid of a bow-thruster but with the benefit of a large audience of fascinated onlookers.
