A fine day, little wind, a flowing tide – ideal for taking Blue Mistress up the River Tamar to Cotehele – a long-held ambition.
(Click on images to enlarge)
I have sailed on the Tamar once before, (you’ve guessed it – over fifty years ago), but this will be the first time I have navigated it alone – (in my current incarnation as older man).
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.
(Click on image to enlarge)
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)
A little perspective. There were 13,704,819 new WordPress blogs in 2013, 10 million the year before. That’s a lot of people writing a lot of words. But we still do it – writing them and hopefully reading them too.
We can’t read them all, so we follow particular blogs. We like the writer’s style or we like the subject and hope to learn more. Over time, we get to know the writer pretty well – or we think we do. And we notice the changes. Maybe the original topic has run its course, (perhaps the particular voyage has come to an end), or maybe the writer has reached a life-changing junction, (a different sort of voyage coming to an end). Few subjects are consistently interesting over a long period and even fewer writers are able to make them so. The blogs that stand the test of time ebb and flow – the writer revealing a pulse that keeps his/her blog alive.
Sometimes there is a longer pause. The writing stops. The writer needs to back away and think for a while. So with this one.
Well over a year ago I decided to finish the day-job. The process of finding a successor and finishing work took over. As life became less certain, I found writing more difficult. And as with the blog, so with the boat, I lost sea-time – something I thought would never happen. The whole process took a lot longer and was a lot more traumatic than I imagined. For a long while it felt like walking a very narrow gangplank with a long drop to the sea and every possibility of falling into it. It’s over now – the stormy period is easing. Maybe I will talk about it when the time is right. I want to start writing consistently again.
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Although it can be read as a single post, the above is part of a series that illustrates one of the author’s current interests, taken from a locker full of interests, at a major waypoint in his life. The series sets out as a comment on retirement before focusing around language. He wonders whether he himself has the language to cope as he steps out into the wider world popularly known as ‘retirement’ – an irreversible step into a world that he has previously only glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, a world in which he thinks the word ‘retirement’ to be a misnomer. He has used the medium of the blog to paint the picture. The irony is that, whereas writing about it does allow him to reflect, sitting alone at a computer actually distances him from the face-to-face interaction he is describing.
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.
Saturday Feb 04, 2012 UT/GMT
▲ 02:40 4.6m
▼ 08:50 2.3m
▲ 15:20 4.6m
▼ 21:20 2.1m
0600 UTC Sat 04 Feb – 0600 UTC Sun 05 Feb
Wind Variable, becoming south or southwest, 3 or 4, increasing 5 to 7, veering north later.
Sea state Moderate or rough, but slight for a time in east.
Weather Rain and drizzle for a time.
Visibility Moderate or good, becoming poor for a time.
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On the road to Plymouth, a large neon sign “Heavy Weather Warning. Drive Carefully.”
OK, drive carefully – but ‘Heavy Weather Warning’? Not really. It was going to snow overnight in the east of the UK, but not here.
If we overstate every inkling of every risk, who will ever pay attention to the warning? And if we do pay attention every time to every organisation – organisations whose very existence require that they constantly warn us how much danger we are in, aren’t on a fast track to mediocrity?
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The rain started as I climbed aboard. It set in for the rest of the morning – light rain.
A morning of short jobs.
Both batteries were well down but the engine started first time – not always the case. I refilled the greaser for the stern gland. Grease travels!
The pair of oars I bought aboard needed stowage space. I am looking for a sweep for sculling but these are definitely too short for that.
Also, the chain locker is too small. Feeding the rode back down the narrow hawspipe, I find the chain blocking the pipe and I am left with a length on deck. (Too much chain? Not enough locker). I have to go below and clear it. That works in a flat calm but it’s no fun having chain flaying around the deck in a sea while I struggle below. It also takes time to re-stow the anchor and rode; plus I want to keep the anchor off the deck. So I am trying out plastic bins of varying sizes (including a flexible laundry basket). We’ll see what works best.
I fixed two brass hooks. Everything gets stowed away at sea, but at anchor you need somewhere to hang things.
And then there was time to write.
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A quiet morning – or so I thought . . .
. . . then 60 plus rowers appeared from nowhere.
No wind yesterday but a fine day to run the engine.
I removed the sail cover and attached the halyard but left the lazy jacks in place as I didn’t expect to set the sail. As the Sound opened up it, it was almost empty – two vessels in sight, one trying to set a sail. A little later he had given up.
It was also a perfect day to anchor and run out the rode. I dropped anchor around 1300 close to Jennycliff near the Withyhedge beacon.
Then time for lunch, and, as I had bought the dinghy with me, time for some photography.
There were three naval vessels at anchor. The village of Cawsand can be seen in the sunshine on the far side of Plymouth Sound – (just aft of the pulpit).
All the metal work makes Blue Mistress look positively industrial. The depth is 7.7 metres – it had dropped from 8.4 metres in the 3/4 hour I had been at anchor.
The washed-out colours of January.
This simple rig holds the course giving plenty of time to go fetch something from below. It works just as well under sail..
The tide was low and the water slack as I passed the Cattewater Wharves.
Flinterlinge, registered out of Groningen, was busy unloading.
Beyond Steeple Point 