All nighter
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Fri 13 Aug 2010 16:48
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48:34.40N
04:36.15W So...tired... can... barely..
typppppppppppppppppppppppppppzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
It takes 22 hours to sail from Dartmouth to l'Aber
Benoit in northwest Brittany. As it turns out. This is roughly what we budgeted
and there were mercifully few surprises during the crossing. The ships came and
went. It was often hard to tell whether they were huge and far away or small and
close until you could hear the throb of their engines above the sound of water
fizzing under the bows.
We did a two hour on, two hour off set up through
the night. The Windvane steering is not yet properly commissioned, so we were
hand steering all the way. Being a boat it's possible to fall asleep for a a
minute or so without diaster ensuing.
There was a more or less steady 15 knot wind from
the northwest which saw us through the many sharpened rocks of l'Aber Benoit and
into the river at low tide. We anchored in the river close to a small fishing
boat and cracked open a bottle fo champagne to celebrate the start of our
journey. In a scene of comic simplicity, the champagne gave way rapidly to the
less pleasant job of dismantling, checking and reassembling the marine loo on
board, which had been playing up. It took three hours, but we're once again an
'en suite' boat.
Sleep was only temporarily disrupted at 3am when we
found ourselves lying across the river against the tide, pinned to a bag of
oysters; carelessly left on the bottom by a fisherman. A quick haul on the
anchor chain pulled us free and we swang back into the main part of the river
for a quiet night. Zzzzzzzzzz
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