51:07.11N 01:18.59E Bastille Day and time to leave France to her celebrations.  The forecast for North Foreland to Selsey Bill is good ‘NW 3 or 4, backing 5 or 6 later.  Sea state slight or moderate. Visibility good, occasionally poor later.’  The forecast was issued at 0600 so ‘later’ doesn’t concern us, we’ll be tied up in England.  It’s a beautiful day so we leave just after 1100 and can see England as soon as we get outside the harbour walls.  We enjoy a sparkling, sunny beam reach with a favourable tidal stream up to the point at which we join the traffic separation scheme (TSS), described in Reeds as having the greatest concentration of commercial shipping in the world.  Each ‘half’ is about an hour’s sailing so we line ourselves up, take a deep breath and set off across the scheme in company with another yacht of similar size, making sure we cross at right angles as required.  It’s all textbook stuff, interesting and exciting, and we reach the middle ‘central reservation’ comfortably.  Here we put in another reef as the wind and sea have risen, and both yachts wait for a cargo ship to pass before setting off again on what is fast becoming a roller coaster.  The seas are big and rising and the wind is now steadily rising too although still from the NW, so we’re close hauled as we cross the second half.  The strong Springs tide is pushing us eastwards but we’d foreseen that and we exit the TSS still upwind and uptide of Dover exactly as planned. 

We can see the west entrance clearly but wind and seas are still rising the nearer we get.  We call up Port Control as required and then, as we near the entrance, we make our first mistake of the day and take the sails down, ready to go in.  Engine alone can’t combat the tide and wind and it quickly becomes clear we’re being swept downstream and won’t make the entrance.  We request permission to enter through the east entrance and set off along the breakwater.  That is mistake number two as we discover there are horrendous undercurrents and heavy swells along this wall.  Combined with the strong tidal stream and wind now in excess of 30 knots we become like a piece of flotsam and we’re thrown and pitched in every direction, inexorably pulled towards the harbour wall.  Gordon does a brilliant job keeping us going in the right direction so we’re not turned over, port control instructs an incoming ferry to wait for us and we somehow manage to turn in through the entrance.  Once we’re finally tied up in the marina we can only sit and look at each other in disbelief.  Even writing this on Tuesday morning I know we’re lucky to be here unscathed.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing, we should have kept our sails up and, once we’d decided to use the other entrance, we should have gone back out to sea and made a wider approach. Talking to others it seems many people had a horrible time too, one person had to use a storm jib to get in and another, coming from Eastbourne, was caught with too much sail up and travelling downwind couldn’t turn to reef.

So, crossing the Channel for the first time was always going to be an interesting exercise but we definitely got more than we bargained for and the experience will stay with us forever.  Today is a take-it-easy day with time for a stroll round Dover and hopefully we’ll be on our way again tomorrow.  We have decided to berth Mira at Hartlepool rather than North Shields so we will now steadily make our way up the east coast as weather permits.