It was as if each creature in the dark depths of the sea had a call sign consisting of one, two or three notes so that for example one of them would use tee-lah-so, another ray-far, and another simply doh. And gradually, lying there listening in the dark, these one-, two- or three-note calls became an individual, a voice.
What was surprising was that none of these voices ever overlapped one another. Each one, pure and unhurried, completed its snatch of song before the next began. And once you stopped concentrating on the individual notes it became music. A song from the sea. A lullaby. I listened for a long time, until warmth and tiredness became irresistible and the lullaby from the deep lulled me into one of the sweetest sleeps I can ever remember.
It stopped sometime during Ian’s watch, although the dolphins remained until several hours after sunrise. They were still there when I got up, swimming on the surface now, hundreds of them. Ian said he’d never known dolphins stay with a boat all night like that. I have asked other yachtsmen since about the sound but they have all shaken their heads and looked at me suspiciously. But three of us heard it.
This trip gave us much more confidence in handling Voyager by ourselves, once David and I got her home, than if we had simply had her delivered to us. And the boat herself gave me confidence. Her self-furling main, genoa and staysail meant you didn’t have to leave the cockpit to handle the sails. The cockpit itself was deep and in the centre of the boat, so you felt secure even in big seas, and she had a wheel not a tiller. Most of all, she was built for cruising so was not only stable but comfortable.
In the next three seasons, sailing two-handed at weekends and annual holidays, we explored Ireland from Carlingford Loch to Bantry Bay, and the English and Welsh coasts from the Isle of Man to West Sussex. And that was how Voyager came to be at Emsworth in Chichester Harbour. She was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks, and then we would collect her and take her home; but work commitments and unsuitable weather had meant that we had had to leave her there for the winter.
As things turned out, she was to remain there for most of the following summer as well. Now, however, we are finally free to enjoy what is left of it, not unmindful that David has been lucky and that we might so easily have not been making this journey at all.
Actually it’s strange, looking back, to realise how very nearly our voyage didn’t happen, for all sorts of reasons. Normally our boat spent her winters up on a sheltered northern river bank miles from the sea but only an hour’s drive from our home. There we could antifoul, polish and spring clean her at weekends without undue travelling.
During that final winter, however, which Voyager spent up on the hard at Emsworth, a cyclone – not unknown off England’s south coast but usually blowing harmlessly out at sea – carved its way in a south-westerly direction past Selsey Bill and then swerved inland, destroying property although happily no life.
We had felt particularly helpless that night, sitting in front of the television news watching an arrow on a map follow the cyclone’s path straight towards Voyager. Fortunately the cyclone veered off back out to sea before it reached the boatyard. Had it travelled a bit further overland our dreams of a warm Mediterranean winter would have been buried in angst and insurance claims.
THE CHANNEL ISLANDS
5
Isle of Wight to Alderney
As we cast off from our mooring buoy at 6 o’clock next morning a ketch glides confidently out of Yarmouth Harbour, its sails silhouetted against an enormous orange sun. We put out our own sails, including the new mainsail, but the light wind soon becomes variable, and then negligible, so we take them all in again and motor.
We leave the Solent via the North Channel. It takes us past Hurst Castle, a brooding, melancholy pile built by Henry VIII to guard against the French. It was still being added to by the Victorians for the same reason. It was also here that King Charles I was held for 19 days in the December of 1648. His small cell was so gloomy, said a visitor, that it needed candles even in the middle of the day. Five weeks later he was taken to be executed in London.
Despite being garrisoned during the 17th and 18th centuries, Hurst Castle was involved in the smuggling trade, the smugglers having done a deal with the castle’s officers. The contraband came from France, and often via the Channel Islands, that small group of islands in the English Channel which although close to the French coast have been British territory for centuries. Our destination is Braye Bay, on the north-west coast of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. We are following the smugglers’ route in reverse.
It is a beautiful sunny morning, with just a little haze and wispy cloud. David, however, is becoming increasingly concerned. We have never been to the Channel Islands before, and his problem is that to follow the course to Braye Bay which the GPS provides, he has to steer at an angle 35 degrees from where his calculations indicate. He repeatedly goes below to consult the chart and tide table, but can find no explanation for what is happening. In the end he decides to rely on the GPS and puzzles over whether we could be experiencing a freak tide because it is quite apparent that it is flowing in the opposite direction to what the printed tide table says. To add to his unease, visibility begins to deteriorate.
Late afternoon we see our first gannets of the year. They are cruising in ones and twos, the tip of one elegant wing not quite touching the water. The gannet is large and sleek and very white with black wing tips, a distinctive yellow head, and a droop-snoot reminiscent of Concorde. When they dive for fish they soar vertically, plummet dramatically and, after a surprising length of time underwater, rise majestically to the surface with their catch. A much-maligned bird – its very name a synonym for gluttony–the gannet’s eating habits seem no different from any other bird’s, while in flight it is a joy.
Gannets are usually in a flock, their flight synchronized, almost languid, although when required they can reach 60mph. Mostly, however, their rhythm is unhurried and they will pass across your stern in a leisurely glide to take a look at you, eye to eye.
Most captivating of all is when they fly in formation, for there stirs in the memory an image from all the old black-and-white movies about fighter pilots you ever saw, and a voice intoning nasally through a leather headset: ‘Red Leader One, this is Red Leader One: get in line at the back there,’ and the slacker at the back pulls himself together and they all flap and glide, flap and glide with every graceful wing beat co-ordinated. It is easy to become very partial to gannets.
We see only two yachts and four tankers all day. This adds to our sense of unreality because the English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world with some 600 cargo ships and 200 ferries either crossing or passing through it daily. And we cannot see Alderney at all until we are two miles off, because visibility has become so poor. Nevertheless we arrive spot-on for Braye Bay and I tell David I think he’s done a sterling job to do that, considering a freak tide and everything. That’s when he confesses that he’d been working from the wrong tide chart. For the first time, Sail & Power Nautical Almanac has produced a two-year version and he had inadvertently put a bookmark against today’s date for next year.
6
Alderney
We head for the anchorage off the town beach, between the town wall and some moored rafts, but slowly since the Channel Islands are notorious for rocks. There is a grinding sound beneath us and David throws Voyager into reverse.
We tear up the bilge covers to see if water is coming in, but none is. And although we see other boats taking what appears to be the same course for hours afterwards, none of them judders to a halt and shoots into reverse like we did.
The anchor bites at the second attempt, putting us a tiny bit closer to a small English monohull called Antares than we would have chosen for absolute courtesy, but the anchor holds fast and so we leave it where it is.
The art of anchoring is not simply to get your anchor firmly dug into the seabed, but also to ensure that you don’t swing into other anchored boats when th
e tide or the wind changes direction. Nor should you drop your own anchor in such a way that it will pull up someone else’s.
Most of the boats at anchor are French apart from Antares. Then another red ensign hoves into view and an Englishman in psychedelic shorts on a boat called Outrageous drops his anchor over the top of ours and spends the rest of the evening talking on his mobile phone. We dine on our favourite brand of sausages, probably our last for a long time, and are in bed by 10pm.
At 1am we are standing on our foredeck watching Outrageous’s stern swinging inches from our bows. David lets out more chain to avoid a collision but it is after two o’clock before we feel confident enough about Outrageous not pulling up our anchor to go back to bed. David is up again for the 5.35am shipping forecast, and again for the 7am tide change to ensure that the extra chain he let out to keep Outrageous off our bows does not put us at risk of hitting Antares. We sit on deck with chocolate biscuits, and coffee in the last clean cups on board because we didn’t wash up last night. When he is satisfied with our position, David goes back to bed. He looks tired. I stay on deck.
It has not been a restful night, but it is a glorious sunrise; misty, with a silver-yellow sun climbing up behind the fortress on the hill above us. In the vague, shifting light it is impossible to tell where the fort ends and the headland begins. Both are draped in shades of grey-brown with vaporous mist swirling about them. What later turns out to be a concrete outcrop of the fortifications, at this moment looks for all the world like the diaphanous sail of a ghostly ship until I realise that the mast would have to be around 200 feet high. Among my numerous failings as a seaman is an inability to judge size at a distance, or to accurately gauge spatial relationships. On the other hand, they do occasionally provide some stunningly beautiful images.
Most of the French boats leave now, along with Outrageous. Shortly afterwards fog sets in with a vengeance, bringing cries no doubt of ‘Zut Alors!’ from those who have rushed out. By 8am nothing is visible beyond the few boats still anchored around us. The life-boat’s engine roars into action but it does not appear to go anywhere. Once its engine is turned off there is just the sound of water lapping around our stern, the tide sucking on the beach, a distant fog horn and faint, frenetic sounds coming from a French radio station, drifting in wisps like mist, there one minute and gone the next.
At 8.15 the beach and mooring buoys become suddenly visible again as the sun manages to pierce the fog. The young, black-bearded man on Antares, in his red and black check shirt and black trousers, lights a cigarette, hauls water up in a black rubber bucket and scrubs his decks with a stiff broom.
The fog closes in again and then lifts once more.
Antares’ man leisurely puts out fenders along his starboard side, ties on mooring lines fore and aft and tightens his sheets, all with light, unhurried movements. He hauls up half a ton of chain, starts his engine, lights another cigarette, raises another half ton of chain plus the anchor, gazes around him to ascertain that the coast is clear, returns to his cockpit and motors slowly off towards the fuel dock. I want to do it like that; always mentally ahead of what’s needed instead of perpetually scrambling up from behind. I think I must be a great strain on David’s nerves.
I begin work on yesterday’s washing up. I miss the dishwasher already. The fog continues to come and go. Through the galley window I look out on a sandy beach and the Sea View Hotel. Voyager lies between two enormous fortifications: Fort Albert, the arsenal on Roselle Point; and Fort Grosnez behind the breakwater. Military defences, from the Iron Age to the present day, exist all over the world as a testament to man’s capacity for grabbing somebody else’s piece of turf. Looking out on them, I am struck by the irony that these two forts, along with four others on Alderney, were all being built in the mid-19th century as a defence against the French, despite the fact that France at that time was Britain’s ally in the Crimean War.
As you sail through the coastal towns of Europe, of course, the reverse appertains, and the invaders’ names become English. In particular, the Elizabethan naval commander and privateer, Sir Francis Drake (c1541–1596), holds a special place in many a tourist brochure, his name preceded by the words ‘burnt down by’ and followed by a date. ‘Don’t mention the war,’ is to become a refrain of our visits ashore.
We had intended leaving Alderney for Guernsey at 2.30 this afternoon, this being the time recommended in the cruising guide at which to navigate the formidable Swinge. But the Harbour Master, while delivering a Customs form for us to complete and relieving us of £2 for our night’s anchorage, says the fog is due to return shortly. As we have no desire to Zut Alors among the rocks in fog, and are both short on sleep, we decide to remain another night.
There are rules for the sea-going; not only things like collision avoidance regulations which are designed to prevent you putting yourself and others at risk, but also measures to protect the sea itself. This includes never throwing garbage overboard. You put it in a bag, tie it up, and take it ashore for appropriate disposal. For whatever arcane reason, this is called a gash bag.
We put our gash bag into our new aluminium dinghy, and take her on her maiden voyage into Braye Harbour. We have had small rubber dinghies before but, since you travel sitting on the sides of them, in anything but dead calm water your bottom gets wet. We not only wanted one that we could sit inside, but also something we could sail, row, paddle or use with an outboard engine. We bought exactly what we wanted at not inconsiderable expense from the most offensive salesman I have ever encountered. I was for head-butting him and leaving the showroom, but David is more tolerant than me and nobody else made a dinghy like it. We only ever see one other, in Braye Harbour today, so maybe I wasn’t the only one allergic to the salesman.
Sometimes, in a certain place at a particular time, for no reason you can ever determine, the atmosphere and everyone around you is utterly relaxed and happy. Alderney is such a place this summer afternoon. An island measuring only three miles by two and inhabited by less than two and a half thousand souls, it reminds us happily of childhood seaside holidays on the mainland in the 1950s.
As we land at the dinghy dock, a couple stop to tie us up and put out their hands to help us ashore. I am so startled at such unexpected courtesy I walk backwards thanking them and hit another woman on the bottom with our gash bag. I apologize profusely. David tells her I am prone to starting fights, and laughing she says it is understandable as I am obviously being kept from the pub. Sunshine, small courtesies and laughter predispose you to pleasure. It is perhaps why revisiting a place that you once enjoyed is so often a disappointment because while the physical landscape may have remained the same, the human dimension is different.
We wander the seafront and the harbour and then adjourn to The Sea View Hotel. It is light and airy with high ceilings and large windows looking across the harbour and out to sea. We lunch in the bar, in a leisurely fashion, on cod mornay and draft cider.
By the time we get back outside, it has become hot and we are drowsy. It is too much effort to climb a steep hill up to the super-market, so we shop at a little place across the road. We buy gache, a local fruit loaf, and oranges and are horizontal in the cockpit under the awning by three. The forecast fog does not intrude into the harbour. There is only a little haze. If we were going to spend a contented afternoon and evening anywhere, we could not have found a more relaxed and pleasant place to be.
The following day begins overcast, but soon becomes bright and hot. We are still bothered about the weight in the bow of the port hull, so David shifts three large boxes out of it into a saloon locker on the principle that the weight will be more central. Unfortunately, almost as much weight appears to come out of the saloon locker and go into the port bow as came out of the port bow in the first place, and it gets even hotter. It is too hot to eat much, so we lunch on bananas and the gache loaf bought the previous day, and set off for Guernsey at half past one.
7
Alderney to Guernsey
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br /> Southbound from Alderney, the shortest route to Guernsey is through two tidal races, the Swinge and the Little Russel. The Swinge lies between Alderney and Burhou, an inhospitable island surrounded by reefs. The chart warns: Dangerous overfalls form in the main Swinge channel. Their position varies with the tidal stream. We are familiar with overfalls – rough water caused by two currents in conflict – from our days in Holyhead. We had found those uncomfortable enough, and they weren’t even marked on the chart as dangerous. You also need to get well clear of Alderney, as the area of coast facing the Swinge has great clusters of rocks stretching a long way out from it. The tidal stream can also reach 7–8 knots at its height, so it is safest to take it at slack water.
After clearing the Swinge you then have a few miles of open sea before arriving at Little Russel, which when you look at it on the chart can be quite daunting. This channel has Guernsey to the west and the islands of Herm and Jethou to the east. Reefs and rocks stretch out well to the north of Herm as well as half way out towards Guernsey, while throughout the channel itself there is an assortment of rocks and shallow areas.
Strangely, although a narrower channel than the Swinge, the strongest currents here reach only 5 knots. We head for a waypoint to the east of Platte Fougére lighthouse and then have a series of waypoints in our GPS to help us just in case. However, it is a bright sunny day, we can spot the markers and buoys easily, and it is an uneventful passage.
From the bit of open sea between these two races the French coast is visible. It is our first glimpse of mainland Europe. So far so good. We are on our way.
8
St Peter Port
Twenty-one miles on from Alderney we approach the marina at St Peter Port, Guernsey’s major town. It is packed. A harassed but polite marina manager in a dinghy shuffles us into the only space available, third in a raft-up on one of the visitors’ pontoons outside the marina. Our arrival effectively cuts off the exit in front of us, as we fill the space between the two English boats on the left hand pontoon to which we are to tie ourselves, and three French boats swinging about in a louche sort of way and which are rafted up to a pontoon over on the right.
Dolphins Under My Bed Page 3