Fw: Drunken Sailor V - 18th Dec 2009

Symphony
Fri 25 Jun 2010 13:55


Subject: Drunken Sailor V

Well hello y’all

 

We got back to the UK last Friday, 10 days earlier than planned. We were in Cadiz in Spain on Thursday morning at 0700hrs, when we got a phone call from Sharon’s sister telling us that her Dad had a serious heart attack. We then had to wait 10 hours for the tide to take us in the right direction and back through the Straits to Gibraltar. We sailed for 16 hours and got into Gib at 0700 and flew out about four hours later.

“Grandad Wullie” is going to be OK and is now out of hospital and we are in Edinburgh for Christmas with the girls.

Well much has happened since my last blog! We got to Scotland at the end of June. Our final run was spectacular. We sailed from Northern Ireland heading for the Mull of Kintyre. This is another place where the pilot books can scare you shitless......the Irish Sea basically empties and fills via the Mull and the tidal rip close to the shore can reach 6 knots and does a fair imitation of the Colorado River if you get wind over tide. So the idea is that you stay about three miles off the coast. We were lucky, it was a beautiful day and our tidal calcs were good.....at one point we were doing 12 knots with the engine on half revs...(normally the engine gives us 6 knots flat out).

We got to the lovely, remote but tiny island of Gigha and dropped anchor in a bay in the north west corner at about eight o’clock at night. Our own private piece of paradise....for about 20 minutes!

I was below cooking supper when Sharon shouted down that another yacht was in sight and clearly heading in our direction.  We have come to find that whenever you find a nice secluded place and drop anchor that yachts appear out of nowhere and decide to anchor 6 feet away and within an hour your idyllic anchorage has turned into bloody Hazlehead caravan park....complete with dogs barking loud music and drunken Germans. We have even had a 100 year old Dutch ketch anchor within spitting distance and had to watch the woman hold her two dogs over the side whilst they had a shit!

We have come to the conclusion that the new arrivals spot us at anchor and think that we know what we are doing and have anchored on good holding ground with the right shelter....little do they know that we haven’t a clue!!!

We have developed a technique for dealing with this. It is the “Sharon Stare”. As the boat approaches and the friendly crew wave, Sharon stands on the stern, tight lipped, with a “come any closer and I will turn you to stone glare”. Suddenly the approaching skipper hesitates and generally beats a hasty retreat....but not in this case.

The yacht was a biggie around 55 feet and was clearly going to pass within a few feet of our stern and this in an otherwise empty ocean.

I joined Sharon to increase the stare power and if necessary to revert to the age old technique of yelling Foxtrot Oscar whilst waving a winch handle menacingly, which has been useful in dealing with jet skiers.

The boat continued to close and to our amazement we saw the skipper bouncing up and down in the cockpit shouting “You are the last two fucke%rs i thought I would see here!”

It was Andrew, the refit manager from the boatyard we had left in Southampton some thirty days and 650 miles ago - the same guy that had looked at our boat with a view to fitting a washing machine! It transpired that he had done the same journey  in 4 days to help some friends out! He had recognised Symphony from way out at sea and could not resist coming to see us. It is truly a small world.

Anyway we went from there to Craobh Marina, 20 miles south of Oban, where we hired a berth for the next twelve months. It was to be our base for exploring the Western Isles during the “Summer Which Never Happened”........

We had a couple of weeks with no wind and some sunshine where we were joined in turn by the girls and Sharon’s sister and kids and we motored around Mull, anchored in some beautiful places, saw some huge basking sharks, and then the rains came.....

Despite having spent many holidays in wet tents on the west coast nothing prepared me for what happened next. It started raining in the last few days in July and didn’t stop until September. And this wasn’t Scotch mist. This was 24 hours a day rain of biblical proportions and regular winds of Force 8 and 9. We sat fascinated one night lugging into VHF Ch 16 listening to the coastguard trying to cope with boats being driven ashore in normally safe anchorages.

It transpires that it was the rainiest August since records began and the third wettest month ever recorded for Argyll. We had water leaking into the boat through the tiniest holes. We had mould growing on the wall panels. My only consolation was that I discovered a stall in Oban which sells the best prawn sandwiches in the world for a mere £2.50......and you get about ½ a pound of prawns. I also discovered a little fish shop next to the ferry terminal where you could buy crab claws at £7 a kilo and mussels for £2.50 a kilo and I had great fun cooking them up in ginger, chilli and garlic.

Pity that Sharon hates sea food......and at times made me sleep with my head out of the hatch because my breath was “foul”. Frankly the smell on deck was worse cos that’s where she threw out my socks and shoes at night.

By September we had had enough. The journey to Scotland had been scary but fun. We did have a lovely 8 days in early September and managed to visit Rum and the south of Skye but we got very little sailing done and certainly not enough experience for the Biscay crossing next May and then it started raining again.

As I had been stuffing my face with seafood, Sharon had been doing a bit of research and had identified a fast track 3 month yachtmaster course based in Gibraltar. So we put Symphony to bed for the winter and flew out in late October and started another adventure.

As has been the case, our departure from Symphony was not without incident...we left in  a screaming force 10 storm and the last item off the boat was the computer bag......yeh,  you guessed it, I dropped it into the oggin. This was a major blow because we had our entire music collection of 4000 tracks on it. But as a prudent computer user I had everything backed up twice over. Once on the I pod and also on a portable hard drive. Unfortunately they were in the same bag.

This resulted in a total farce .....I managed to get the bag out of the water just as the battery on the lap top shorted out and smoke starting pouring out. It was a truly hysterical Drunken Sailor that managed to salvage the hard drive as the wind and rain howled across the deck. We had a very silent 3 hour drive to Edinburgh and I thought it a measure of my increasing self control in advanced middle age that I only experienced two incidences of near homicidal road rage on the journey.

 

The yachtmaster course takes you back to the very beginning and thankfully in our case assumes you know nothing. It is designed for people who want to become professional skippers and teach others. Our intake is 12 strong and consists of a disparate bunch of people who are all strange or slightly crazy.....which in retrospect shouldn’t be surprising given that they have either decided to bail out of their existing lives and jobs or are young guys looking for a bit of fun. Sharon and I are of course completely normal.......

We have been living on board the boats which are well worn and started by doing two to three day trips to Morocco or up the coast to Marbella. Gibraltar Bay and the straits are incredibly busy shipping areas and it is normal to weave your way through heavy traffic whilst dealing with tides of anything up to 5 knots. In fact I skippered a crossing to North Africa where we were all looking forward to a few beers and some warm food (it can get very cold down there) where it took me some time to realise that despite a boat speed of six knots we were in fact heading for Italy....oh that’s the other thing we are not allowed to use the GPS and other modern equipment in the boats (its usually broken anyway)...we have to take sightings and use paper charts...which of course means that we are lost most of the time! Much to the disgust of the crew we got into port in the early hours of the morning.

We have now graduated to longer hauls culminating in a two week run from Gib to Cape St Vincent on the SW corner of Portugal. It has been hard work, doing four hours on, four hours off watches and in our case sleeping in a wet berth because the hatch in our cabin leaked like a sieve. In fact we have not had a day off during the whole stint with any days in the home port spent in the class room.

Anyway I need to wind up now. We have just returned from a traumatic visit to Oban to check out Symphony to find that all the power had tripped out and that she was filling with water. I spent 5 hours with an electrician tracking down the problem....and Sharon made some useful suggestions as to where the problem might be.....economists have a way with electrical things (“It wouldn’t be that black thingie thats broken?)  The electrician and I know each other well...we are probably one of his major sources of income.....

Rule 1: don’t buy a yacht!

Rule 2: if you do buy a yacht buy a simple one

Rule3: if you buy a yacht marry an electrician...being gay would be cheaper than marrying an economist. 

 

All the very best from the Drunken Sailor and his revolting Crew member. We wish you good health and fair winds for 2010.