Sunday, October 16, 2011

No True Beauty Without Decay

She's Home!

33 hours, 180 miles, 112 litres of fuel.  Non-stop from midnight Friday to breakfast on Sunday.

We put 22% of the total hours on her engine in one go.  There was a weather window and we went for it.  Although we motor sailed for some of the time, we never took the engine out of gear and we never stopped moving.



Time:          Midnight
Position:      Lymington
Crew on Deck:  Head Cook (Skipper)
               Cooklet (First Mate)
               Spaniel
               Boy Named Sue
Boat Mood:     Optimistic

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 west 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.


Time:          Dawn
Position:      Selsey Bill
Crew on Deck:  Head Cook
               Spaniel
               Boy Named Sue
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.


Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Lift and Separate


Survey day arrived... 

With the ready ease that comes from lifting hundreds of boats for hundreds of similar inspections, the hoist engineers prepared the slings, shoved her by hand into the wet dock and proceeded to crane all 5 tonnes of her straight out of the water with no more ceremony or fuss than if she were a pallet of bathroom fittings being offloaded from a Jewson’s lorry to a building site.  

I stood there watching from the side of the dock. She swayed gently in the strengthening breeze like a giant marble in an industrial-sized Newton’s Cradle.   The operators were so matter-of-fact that I had no concern at all – in fact I realised that to them, toilets is exactly what she was - a valuable and fragile but entirely pedestrian consignment to be delivered intact to her destination.

In this case her destination was 30 meters ahead of where she started.  They revved-up, beeped like a Morrisons’  lorry reversing out of a country cul-de-sac and rolled gently up the tracks before depositing her onto her keel on the hard-standing.  This is known as a lift-and-hold. 

Job complete they slipped away for a cup of tea and a B & H.

External inspection involved scraping anti-fouling paint from her hull to ensure a clean contact surface for the moisture meter, hitting her with a hammer to test her bass response, grasping her shafts and bearings and examining them for movement in an inappropriate plane, and abrading her through-hulls looking for signs of de-zincification which looks like a made-up word because it is.  (Like its distant etymological cousin Morgenmuffel - a disposition to morning grumpiness - this compound word encapsulates its own meaning comprehensively, and I am confident that I need offer no further clarification.)

She passed all these indignities with colours flying, though she wept a little from her rudder due to a hairline fracture that will need an epoxy repair in due course.  If I sound like I know what I am talking about then that’s because I don’t.  I have a lifetime of experience of pretending to know something about something and a simple technical issue like “Osmosis of the GRP Sandwich” presents no serious challenge to a county-class bullshitter like me. Anyway - bollocks have always been in the ear of the beholder – people want to believe what they want to believe and attempts to shine a light into dark corners are often resisted.

This is the reason Derren Brown has been repeatedly overlooked for a Nobel Prize.  

It is also the reason that we are buying the boat with no attempt to get the vendor to mend the rudder.  To us she is perfect and hairline cracks are no part of that fantasy. 

I trust when we come to sell her we will find some similarly deluded individuals to pay for her.