The End of Winter?
Lera(hen3ry)
Malcolm Cann
Tue 27 Mar 2007 11:34
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.