Having wasted nearly 5 months sitting out the winter in Jersey I finally
decided it was time to move to Brest via L'AberWrac'H. 48:35.939N
04:33.891W.
I decided Thursday the 23 Mar was a good day to escape since the sea
state was expected to be slight to smooth becoming moderate over night.This,
unfortunately, meant the wind was SW at the start but moving to W then
finally to NE overnight. I initially intended to go directly to Brest but
things conspired to make me divert to L'AberWrac'H.
I found to my horror that as soon as I left St Helier harbour the sea
state was far from slight but as the tide was with me continued on my
course, heading directly into the wind on my three cylinder trusty steed.
This was fine until I got about 20 miles off Lezardrieux where I passed
between "Plateau des Roches Douvre" and "Plateau de Barnouic", obviously a
narrow channel with high speed tide, and it was here that the tide finally
went against me. The wind still hadn't come around to help me so I chuffed
on, covering 6miles in 3hours, which I found really depressing. Finally I
got some wind and the tide slackened and more progress was made.
From here on life was not so bad except that while motoring the main
halyard had got tangled around the radar reflector, and there was no way I
was going to try to free it considering angles the boat was getting to. The
sea state had roughened a little as it was supposed to. I continued with the
motor ticking over and the genoa doing most of the pulling. For some reason
it suddenly came into my head that if the fuel guage reached 1/2 the engine
would stop and that would leave me without most of ny navigation not to
mention the ability to motor into harbour. I think this must be to do with
being battered for 24hours. I diverted to L'AberWrac'H, this being the
nearest place with full marina facilities. I arrived at L'AberWrac'H at
about 1300 to see a building site where I expected to see a marina, I did a
bit of running around only to find that the neaest fuel was 2km down the
road and had to be fetched in cans, I needed at least 60litres and only have
a 10litre can. I tied myself to a fishing boat bouy(all the fishing boats
had gone away) fed and went to sleep.
|
