7 minute read
Tom Cunli e
Tom Cunliffe
Spring is in the air and cross channel trips are back on the agenda. Tom recalls an early misadventure and an important lesson learnt
By the time this edition of Sailing Today lands on the doormat, Easter will be upon us. Brexit may have affected the hassle-free option of an early trip to France for South-Coast boats, but sending in customs forms isn’t the end of the world. It’s true that in recent years we’ve enjoyed a period of seamless travel, but the good old days of bottles of rum tucked away in pillow cases and packets of fags stashed in the anchor locker are still within living memory. In a way, the formalities that are back with us add to the sense of occasion. We’ve really ‘been foreign’ now, rather than just nipping over to a nearby ‘member state’.
Easter has always been busy for the cruising sailor. Boat hoist slots must be booked in good time. A lightning fit-out follows the launch, invariably rushed, then bank holiday weekend arrives with car-loads of charts, victuals, lifejackets, excited sailors and, once again now, customs forms.
When I’m in home waters, my initial target is often a trip across the 60 miles of open sea to Cherbourg from the Solent. It’s a suitable challenge with a tangible reward. These days I’m sailing a 44-foot cutter with a useful engine, a decent suit of sails and a large GPS-driven chart plotter. Time blurs the memory and it’s hard to equate this ideal arrangement with
PODCAST
Catch up with Tom’s columns now and in the future at sailingtoday.co.uk
my first crossing in 1971. My boat then was a bermudan sloop built in 1930 exactly half the length of the current floating wonder. With her centreboard up she drew three feet and her auxiliary motor was a one-lunged, hand-cranked creation of Lucifer that only propelled the yacht on the rare occasions when it condescended to fire. Apart from the complete lack of headroom in the tiny cabin, the other feature of note was the centreboard case which divided the saloon in two. This was open at the top like a dinghy’s. Since water always finds its own level, in calm conditions the arrangement afforded the casual observer a useful view of the sea slopping around down the crack. Beating in offshore waves changed this comfortable setup. Every time the upper level of the casing fell below the top of the seas outside, water would spurt into the saloon. We knew why it did this and that, so long as we kept on pumping, it was unlikely to sink us, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. My wife Roz, who at this stage of our careers had as much sea experience as a Manchester bus conductor, took a particular dislike to it.
Setting out before dawn from Yarmouth with a fair ebb to the departure point off the Needles, we made the trip across in 18 hours. Navigation was by dead reckoning. I made little allowance for the tide and learned a sharp lesson when the last five miles took three hours with a fair wind.
There was no tidy Cherbourg marina at Chantereyne in 1971. Instead, visiting yachts bundled their way up the long, narrow Avant Port to take pot luck on a berth. When we trickled in at bedtime, the party was in full swing. A haphazard fleet of rafted Brits were piled up against a high, weedy wall. Tending lines was going to be a major issue as the tide rose and fell, but we were small enough to draw no attention so we hung off the outside yacht and kept our heads down until morning.
When I peered over the hatch at 0800 the whole enormous raft was heaving as folks stepped across boat after boat to get ashore to the boulangerie. The early birds were already returning, loaded up with their morning croissants and baguettes.The scene would have seemed exotic had it not been for the smell. Something bad had gone amiss with the plumbing in the yacht club outside which, it now became clear, we were all secured. The flooding tide was preventing any exit to the wide waters outside and we were lying in a pool of sewage.
ABOVE
The Needles is an iconic departure point for many cross channel trips
bonhomie and banter among the yachts dispelled any negative thoughts. Soon, I felt quietly proud to be a fully paid-up member of a community to which, until that day, I had only aspired.
So far so good. Our successful outbound leg was followed by a couple of convivial days in the town among our new chums. The first ebb carried away the floating horrors from the dock and things looked up until it was time to go. Then reality hit. It was raining at 0400 when we scrambled out of our bunks. We had no proper foul weather gear and a steady breeze was blowing down the dock from the north. We turned in again to wait for daylight, but when it arrived it was a poor sort of thing and brought no comfort. Work called and the baker was open, so I loaded up on baguettes while Roz brewed the tea. Then I clambered back across the boats, swallowed a rapid breakfast and hoisted the main at 0700.
Nightfall saw us no further on than mid-Channel. Because we were closehauled and Roz was on her first trip I stayed at the tiller, growing steadily colder and more tired. At midnight we still couldn’t see the Needles or St Catherine’s Point lights, I was nodding at the
ABOVE
Tom’s pint sized command for his 1971 trip
TOM CUNLIFFE
Tom has been mate on a merchant ship, run yachts for gentlemen, operated charter boats, delivered, raced and taught. He writes the pilot for the English Channel, a complete set of cruising text books and runs his own internet club for sailors worldwide at tomcunliffe.com helm and the centreboard case was up to its tricks once more. Roz, who went to a good school and knew how to behave, decided her best plan was to keep me alive so, in between sessions at the bilge pump, she began sending up hot water bottles to stuff up my soaking sweater.
By 0300 I was past caring about the cold and was steering in my sleep. Any idea of deciding which tack to lay the boat on to win a few miles from the lee bow effect would have been a joke. It was bit late to start teaching Roz the nuances of working a small yacht to windward in a seaway and, because I had sunk far beyond thinking straight, I didn’t consider any alternatives. I just clung to the tiller as exhaustion took over.
More asleep than awake, I kept the boat on the wind. At some stage before dawn I must have made a tack more on instinct than information, because first light saw us sailing on a young flood tide towards the Needles Channel. I’ve since found that after a long night watch, my metabolism seems to discover new life as the light grows. This time, the opposite happened. Still west of the lighthouse, we fell in with a yacht on a collision course. It was a bermudan sloop, black with black sails and a white light at the masthead that seemed to be flashing. I was on the starboard tack, so I stood on. At the last minute, I ducked under the yacht’s stern and it was only then that I came to my senses. In those days starboard-hand buoys were black, not green, and there were no cardinals. The yacht was the Bridge buoy and its bow wave was the tide washing past it. I can see the hallucination now.
The lesson here is almost too obvious to spell out. I had ignored the signs of exhaustion and had pushed myself past the bounds of rational behaviour. In mid-Channel I still had two options for getting my head down for a couple of hours, which would have made all the difference. We could easily have hove the boat to. Alternatively, if Roz had struggled to steer to windward in the dark, I could have given her a compass course that wasn’t far off close-hauled. She was young, bright, she wasn’t seasick and she’d done her bit by keeping the hot water bottles coming and the pump gushing.
As for me, I’d made a bad mistake but, as so often happens, I’d been allowed to get away with it. I’ve been deeply tired many times since, but that passage taught me that I must be ready to delegate, if not the whole job, enough of it to get some rest when it’s most needed.
