I am watching the Udder Rock buoy further up the coast. The tide is taking us inshore and I head further out to sea to stay to the seaward of it.
This is the third day of this trip, finally a day of wind, sea and sail. The cloud cover is still low, clinging to the tops of the cliffs. There are no other boats visible and, despite being close to the shore. I can see no one on the coast path.
The early mist had given the harbour a silent, closed feel.
(Click on image to enlarge)
The early morning sunshine doesn’t last and we are soon back to a windless, blue-grey, engine-powered day.
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Wherever you are, the wider world is never far away. I spy Grace with her magnificent Cornish flag leaving the Maritime Museum pontoons. I admire her lines and recognise a smaller version of Ceres, my grandfather’s Westcountry trading ketch mentioned extensively in earlier posts in this blog.
The weather is benign – so benign there is no wind and no sun either. The sea is glassy, the colours bluish grey, the sky and seas almost matching, the horizon sometimes clear, sometimes vague.
The engine gives a comfortable 5 knots, the distance is approximately 40 nm, I have six hours of fair tide. Time to reflect, time to look around.
(Click on image to enlarge)
There are gannets, diving, resting, flying.
It has taken a while to get used to people saying “What? By yourself?” as in “I took the boat down to Falmouth and returned to Plymouth via Fowey? It was a quick three-day trip.” “What? By yourself?”
How do you explain it? To the uninitiated it invites the disapproval of
Despite all of them I succeeded – as do many, many others in far more challenging circumstances.
It has taken many years sailing to be able to say with confidence “I do it like this. I know it is possible to do it like that but I have chosen to do it like this. Yes, the most knowledgeable of intellectuals, the most graceful of athletes, the most creative of artists, the grandest of grandees, they all know better than me. But not quite. Individually they know certain areas of my life better than me and combined they know many areas of my life better than me but the whole of my life belongs to me and I choose to live it like this. I will listen to them but I will make up my own mind whether it is useful for me or not. There’s no side to it, no competition, I respect their point of view but I am taking responsibility for me so I can give back what I learn as I go along.”
Time and money – (not enough of either), have meant that it has taken not months but years to bring Blue Mistress to her current standard – a standard that makes me comfortable in taking trips along the South Devon and South Cornwall coastline.
‘Single-handed’ means thinking things through long before they are needed. The layout of the boat, its contents and every maneuver that may or may not be made has been gone through in your head, maybe on paper, certainly on a computer, and books and videos and charts and tables studied, with the intention that all this be absorbed into experience.
Even then mistakes will be made – some of them very memorable with solutions needed in a breath-taking hurry, but mostly things will go right. Very few of the latter are memorable because what is going on outside the boat is as interesting as what is going on inside. Have you ever seen a coastline from the sea? The Devon and Cornish coasts are particularly stunning. (And, yes, there are plenty of other stunning coastlines too).
I like aloneness but enjoy company. A week ago we took my London-based, four-year-old grandson for his first trip. Enthusiasm on all sides. What’s not to like?
And every trip, every voyage is different.
I took few photos on the Falmouth trip but I will make a short storyboard next post. In the meantime, here is Blue Mistress in Fowey on the last day of September 2014 with the morning mist rising. As I say, what’s not to like?
(Image taken by Bill Whateley)
For those who tune into this blog occasionally and are wondering why I am dodging around topics, it’s because I am doing a short course with WordPress – Writing 101. It lasts a little under three weeks and involves participants posting a blog most days. The topics are varied and a little out of my usual line. My intention is to get back to a writing habit that I lost over the past year. Bear with me, something good will come from it.
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For those who are wondering what has happened to Blue Mistress, the refit is nearly complete. A lot has been done in between longish pauses and I see the chance to get back in the water in the next two weeks. The boat is looking good but needs to be afloat!
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And if you are also wondering when I am going to talk about New Zealand, it will come. In the meantime, this is the Bay of Islands where Webb Chiles (see below) is headed.
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If you are not following Webb Chiles, you should be. Aged 72 and circumnavigating in a boat smaller and lighter than Blue Mistress. It is his sixth time round, I believe. He prefers the solitude of single-handed sailing and was reluctant to fit the Yellowbrick – technology impinging on personal space. In the meantime, we have the privilege of sitting back and admiring. He has been sailing at over five knots for most of the voyage. Fair winds to him.
You can follow him here http://my.yb.tl/gannet
(All images taken by Bill Whateley)
There are a number of reasons why I might not have shown this image – personal embarrassment being high on the list, But then I thought, “Hey, this is what happens if you don’t lift the boat often enough. Not many people have seen this on their vessels, so maybe it will make them feel even better about the refitting work they do.”
I haven’t posted this year. One of the results of a difficult year has been a lack of time afloat. So when, on one of the few times I was able to go to sea, I had engine trouble, I finally decided it was time to lift her and spend some productive refit time over the winter.
And yesterday we did lift the boat, and this is what we saw in the early evening gloom (click on image to enlarge) . . .
. . . not just barnacles but a whole colony of mussels – on the rudder and around the propeller. So this was why the helm was sluggish and the engine was difficult to start.
There were some ripe comments from the lifting crew!
However, Blue Mistress had always cleaned up well and today . . .
She won’t be back in the water until early May. There are a number of jobs I want to do on her, including major work on the engine. And we also have other adventures planned before then.
I will post on the boat again.
I haven’t forgotten this series
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It has been well over a year since I last posted here. There are reasons for this and I will talk about them in time.
But now that I am ready to start again, I find that the title ‘bill’s boatblog’ does not adequately cover what I want to say. I want to reflect wider horizons. However, I don’t want to start a new blog – life’s too short. Hence the new title.
I have changed the font but kept the general layout – there is a lot of historical material that I have posted over the past six or seven years that I would like to keep and one or two readers may find the book references useful.
WordPress has developed into a much more sophisticated software package since my first timid attempts at posting. This is a good thing – we all like to move forward. My first thoughts were that more sophistication means more complication – the process taking over the content. In fact, the changes have made it easier to post on this site. I look forward to more posts.
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I have chosen Steeple Point – a place I have mentioned often. It plays an important part in my story and now that I am moving on from my day job, I want to have a physical base with a long personal connection from which to develop the blog. I could have used a street we have lived in – Belle Vue or Cavendish Road or South Pallant or Martins Lane or Clonbern Road or Nayland Rd South or Stockbridge Gardens or Paradise Road or others. Yes, there are more but none have the nautical connection I am looking for. Steeple Point stretches into the sea. I knew this place before I was old enough to know I knew it.
And there’s more. If the Earth were flat and your eye a perfect instrument, you could stand on Steeple Point, look due west, and see, first of all, very slightly to the north, Cape Clear Island and Fastnet Rock and then, on the southern tip of Ireland, Mizen Head , followed by no land at all until Quirpon Island with L’Anse aux Meadows beyond on the very northern tip of Newfoundland some 1,900 nautical miles away. All between is sea and ocean, wide horizons swept by wind and weather,
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I will still talk about the boat, and I still have an eye for Greek fishing boats particularly those in Crete. They will feature, as will the past, especially the trading ketches of North Cornwall and the Bristol Channel. But there will also be occasional notes about what is going on around me as a I age in an increasingly complex world. Like it or not, all our horizons are changing. We need to recognise those changes.
Bude, Sunday, cloudy skies, low tide
Beginning of the season, the RNLI out in force
The beach crew were checking their gear
The lifeboat crew were about to launch on exercise.
Elsewhere, the surf school was in full swing.
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I had just been to my favourite bookshop, Books by the Sea, which was fatal. I was walking across a beach carrying two books having narrowly avoided buying a third.
The first was a good copy of Eric Hiscock’s Voyaging Under Sail, a 1977 edition of a book originally published in 1959. It is a companion to Cruising Under Sail which I bought many years ago.
Eye-brows are usually raised when I return home with more ‘boat books’. The question has even been asked, “Why buy books when you can get most of the information for free in easily digested packages via Google?” Well, maybe you can, but you don’t get the author.
Even if the technology is outdated,( and it certainly is in the chapters on electrics and photography), Eric and Susan Hiscock’s books reflect their day-to-day learning from their own experience and their continual application of other ideas that they have picked up in their travels. The knowledge, skills and attitudes reflected here are hard won,
Put glibly, their’s is on-the-job learning. Those of us who spend a lot of time book learning a) should get out more, and b), as importantly, should very carefully pick the authors we learn from. With that in mind, the Hiscock’s books should be compulsory reading for anyone who wishes to put their nose beyond the breakwater.
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I was dubious about the second book, then bought it anyway – The Design of Sailing Yachts, by Pierre Gutelle.
This is technical stuff. “The author first considers the air, wind, water and wave and then goes on to the theory of aero- abnd hydro-dynamics and such topics as friction, form-drag, cavitation and viscosity. There follow chapters on the equilibrium of both transverse and longitudinal stability of sailing yachts . . .”
It is full of diagrams, graphs and formulae, a combination that I would normally run a mile to avoid. However, I made myself comfortable in my mother-in-law’s front room, ignored the football on the television and had a go. A while later, I realised I was absorbed. This was physics at a much higher level than I normally tackle, put in a way that I can understand. Extraordinary!
Sailing Blue Mistress has taken on a new dimension.
I didn’t get underway until 1530 on Friday.
Everyone else seemed in a hurry to get ashore.
Maggie
By 1730 the Sound was empty. The wind was Northerly and light, and I had an enjoyable time tacking from the Eastern entrance of Plymouth Sound to Mount Batten Pier before a comfortable sail up to the Cattewater Wharves.
Beyond Steeple Point 