Mike Peyton’s annual cruise with his club had a simple policy: don’t discuss where to go, don’t collaborate on planning and all set off about the same time. It seems that at the dictate of wind and tides, the club members would invariably end up in the same place anyway.
I can understand how that happens, after 10 days of this July’s weather. If you are a cruising sailor of a certain age who does not want to exhaust yourself and your crew to windward, the options for where to go narrow right down as soon as you check tides and wind.
I heard that story second hand because I did not know the great sailing cartoonist while he was alive. Fate brought us together later – Peyton and I are joint authors with David Fairhall of the new edition of Pass Your Yachtmaster which I recently updated and extended for Adlard Coles, and he also supplied the cartoons for David’s Pass Your Day Skipper, for which I did the same.
This year, for months in advance, we discussed multiple cruise destinations for Spring Fever: the Rade de Brest and out to Ouessant, or Roscoff and northern Brittany, or the Scillies, or the Channel Islands, or maybe even a visit again to the East Coast Rivers, gambling on the unlikely event of westerlies turning later in July to easterlies.
But with a succession of westerly lows driving across the UK, squeezed northwards by the heat dome over the Mediterranean, the options narrowed right down by the time we got to Cowes.
There was a brief 24 hours of easterly veering southerly due, then Meteo Marine’s long term forecasts had solid westerlies and south-westerlies for the rest of the forecast out to 2 weeks (maybe fiction, I know, but it was all we had).
So we went straight to Dartmouth, reaching comfortably most of the way, avoiding Weymouth because a night there would have left us beating across Lyme Bay next day in a wind veering to south-westerly 5 to 6.
Actually, we wanted to go to Plymouth to pick up a friend and crew member, but as we neared south Devon, the forecast for the other side of Prawle Point was a force 6 beat to windward and gale force gusts later. Dartmouth it was, with the consolation of meeting other friends there, followed by a couple of nights in Plymouth. Dartmouth is a pleasant place to drop off and pick up crew, in easy road reach of Plymouth, too.
The west country, Scillies and Finisterre forecasts were consistently much worse than the central channel, so we abandoned ideas of going there and contemplated heading down to the Channel Islands.
But then the forecasts made even that look dubious and we ended with one good 18 hour weather window before the gales – west or south-west 3 to 5, though in fact it got up to 6. We decided to use it to go back to Cowes. One big advantage is that we can use our own mooring to save money, because short term high season moorings in the west country are pricey. We plan to start again in a few days, weather permitting. And no, we haven’t decided where to go.
A dull cruise, you might say, but we had two excellent passages of nearly a hundred miles each way to Dartmouth. For a while we got up to 9 knots on the log surfing down waves on the way home (almost 12 over the ground even with a neap tide), averaging 6.5 knots under single-reefed main and genoa. It was hard work for the helms’ shoulder and arm muscles.
We had a good supper and rest on a mooring in Newtown Creek before putting Spring Fever away on her own pontoon in Cowes. The gale arrived the next day.
tide by tide 