Horta to Bristol - Day 14
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Tue 4 Jul 2023 09:42
Overnight was breezy, cold and damp. At 0100 when Annie and I were changing watch I noticed that the weather routings were taking us across to south Wales whereas our marked route on the plotter was continuing along the Devon and Somerset coastline. Annie had worked out that with the neap tides it didn’t make much difference which route you took but I was tired and too slow on the uptake and too grumpy for the occasion. I altered course towards Wales and was rewarded with a dawn sail past Barry power station before heading across to the deeper channel and back onto Annie’s course.
By daylight the wind was dropping but we were well on (ahead) of schedule. Annie’s brother Rob was coming down to meet us as were son Alex with Sarah and grandson Charlie. We had estimated a 1430 arrival and with the flood tide we were going to have to slow down. The difficulty was that we needed to maintain enough speed through the water for steerage and with ships coming up to and away from Avonmouth on the tide we couldn’t afford to drift into the shipping lanes. We furled the sails and motored the last 10 miles, arriving at 1415 and after setting lines and fenders, steered straight into the lock. Our family group was there with a “welcome home” banner and a bottle of Champagne that we enjoyed together in the berth. A quiet return, for which we were grateful as we were both tired and after gathering a few essentials were soon back at home in an empty house - literally, our furniture is all in an attic room. Fortunately our tenants had left a bed that Annie finds extremely comfortable and as I can sleep anywhere a mattress on the floor was fine and we both slept well.
Our full journey is not quite finished. On the 13th August we will come up the River Avon and lock into the floating Harbour in the centre of Bristol where it all began almost exactly eight years ago. This will be the occasion of our formal homecoming and where we hope to see lots of family and friends for a proper celebration. It will also be the subject of my last post with, hopefully, some photographs to record the occasion.
It is our intention to publish our blogs as a hard copy record of our travels; editing and formatting will provide months of work through which we will be able to revisit and correct our many wonderful recollections and reflections. The memory is notoriously unreliable and I frequently have vivid recollections of events that actually took place in different locations at different times under different circumstances. A hard copy will preserve a correct record and be a wonderful heirloom for many grateful generations (!!).
For me, writing the blog has been the preferred alternative to a daily diary. I have found the process enjoyable and absorbing. I am even wondering if there is scope for a post circumnavigation version. However, during the circumnavigation the feedback and even just the knowledge that there have been regular readers has been hugely reassuring; it created the notion of a shared experience and connection with home that was a great comfort. I know that a few have read every one of my and Annie’s posts that over a period of eight years is remarkable! Hopefully there has been enough variety between us to accommodate both the sailing and non sailing fraternity. We have been grateful for the feedback received - not always positive but always welcome!
Since 2015 we have visited 44 countries, crossed the north Atlantic (twice), the south Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and sailed 40,000 nautical miles. 20 months were spent back in Bristol during the Covid pandemic and so the circumnavigation was actually six years but our experiences of the pandemic, both here and abroad, seem an integral part of our trip. Would we do it all again? Yes, absolutely albeit in a slightly larger boat for speed and extra storage space. It has been the most wonderful experience that we can recommend to others. However, the timing for us following retirement and before the grandchildren appeared or grew too much was perfect. Now we don’t have the time and energy for another circumnavigation and our greater priority is life at home with family and friends. I think we will both miss visiting places and people that we could only have visited by boat and we will certainly miss the camaraderie of friends made through the shared experience of the cruising life - more so than the sailing itself. Hopefully coastal cruising with minimal overnight passages is something we can still look forward to and enjoy as a family activity.
An old cliché is that travel broadens the mind. Well, I think it does. We have found a common humanity with people all around the world and far less crime and corruption than we might have expected from what we had read and perceived beforehand. Our experience is that the poorer the community the more hospitality and sharing are considered important and we have experienced this first hand. The mobile phone is now ubiquitous - we have seen isolated communities living in traditional mud floor huts with small solar panels strung up outside for charging their phones. This means that the world is now inter-connected in a way that was unimaginable even 20 years ago. I have read that this is a significant factor in the decline of absolute poverty around the world but it also allows people to understand the shocking levels of relative economic inequality that exist. We have seen what a driver this is for economic migration.
We have seen and experienced the impact of climate change and habitat destruction. With the weather becoming ever more extreme, unstable and unpredictable I wonder for how long it will continue to be possible for sailing around the world to be a reasonably safe adventure. We have experienced unseasonable and unpredictable weather throughout our circumnavigation. Even without the weather factor we have known two yachts that have been abandoned at sea, two that have been sailed onto reefs and lost, known of one that sank with the loss of the two crew during the rescue attempt and several that have been the subject of lookout requests on the radio from coastguards after the yachts had gone missing. Flooding, fires and extremes of heat and cold are now the norm that we are all aware of but continue not to address quickly enough and at our children’s peril. Annie and I have sailed the tropics and visited the Amazon but seen no primary rainforest. We have seen the impact of rising sea levels on island communities. Other than in coastal areas protected from over fishing we have seen little marine wildlife but have seen fishing on an industrial scale throughout the oceans. We have dived extensively on coral reefs but have experienced only a very few locations where the coral is not bleached and dead or dying. We have had plastic waste or exceptional occurrence of seaweed clog our Duogen in every ocean and seen plastic waste covering otherwise pristine beaches all around the world and in the remotest of locations.
Watching the economic and political decline of the UK from afar has been frustrating, particularly when in the company of people of many different nationalities who are just bemused at what is going on here. I am part of the electoral majority that is never represented by government under our antiquated, undemocratic voting system. Along with everyone else I can see the law breaking, trashing of the ministerial code and tax evasion that seem to have become the norm for this government. As a traveller and sailor I experience the restrictions and bureaucracy introduced as a result of Brexit and along with everyone else I can follow the economic indicators that show our poor and declining post Brexit economic performance. This has all come about during our circumnavigation and we are not alone within the sailing community to feel this way. From afar we have seen how a society and economy structured around consumerism and unbridled free market economics leads to inequality, poor public services, weaker social cohesion and environmental degradation. I love this country and now we are home again will strive to influence change to a political system that is doing so much damage. Things could be so much better for the great majority.
So now we will continue to clear out of Vega everything no longer required for circumnavigating. This has included enough accumulated tins, jars and packets of food to have kept us going for months at sea. We no longer require the water maker, freezer or Jordan series drogue and these will be put up for sale. It looks like there may be the marine services at Portishead to deal with things like checking and if necessary replacing through hull fittings and replacing the cutlass bearing on the prop shaft. Other cosmetic repairs such as woodwork dents and scratches, new carpets and replacement of upholstery buttons we can sort ourselves. We need a good electrical overhaul and Colin White, based in Dartmouth and who fitted the new electrical equipment on Vega before we set off, says he can come up to Bristol. And then there is the south Wales coast and Ireland around Cork to explore…………….