Blue Moon's trip around the UK

…who married a mermaid one fine night.
The result of the union was children three
Two were kippers and the other was me.

Hey ho, the winds blow free
Oh for a life on the rolling sea

This cracking little ditty was probably my Dad’s favourite song: he used to wander about the house singing it for no good reason other than that you can’t sing it without feeling happier afterwards. Try it. Oh, the lack of sound again, you don’t know the tune. Ask me round to dinner and I will oblige.

I am guessing that my Dad never actually saw the Eddystone Light since his nautical adventuring was almost all in the browner waters of the East Coast and The Netherlands, so this picture’s for him.

The more seamanlike reader might opine at this point that – given that the photo was taken with a standard iPhone 11 – I am perhaps a little closer than recommended. Observe if you will the waves breaking on the rocks around it. And they have a point; I didn’t mean to be this close, but I got into a bit of a race with a boat that came out of Dartmouth behind me.

We weren’t of course in a race, but I just assumed that he overtook me to prove a point, that he would be as annoyed as I would that I then gybed inside him off Start Point and took his wind, and that was why he then looked like he was about to put a spinnaker up even though it was blowing 22 knots, so I ended up sailing a bit higher than him to keep level, and then it turned out that he was going to Fowey or somewhere completely different from where I was going (Falmouth) and we weren’t in a race at all.

I worry sometimes that I may never become a proper cruising yachtsman just a frustrated racer without any competitors, or indeed – as in this case – a race course.

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I’m hoping that does the trick. More detail? The key nautical concept here is unfairness: his boat was bigger than mine (11.2m vs 10.1m) which means that he should go faster than me by a factor of (4.43 x √11.2) – (4.43 x √10.1) = 0.4 knots. Do keep up. That, of course, is red rag to an ageing bull. I have to go faster than him. That and the fact that there were three people on their boat and it was just me and Raymond the autopilot. Raymond, it seems, had not read the Racing Rules of Sailing recently, and was unaware that ‘hunting down’ (by which you sail fast to windward of someone, then bear down on them menacingly at close quarters) is now strictly illegal.

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Luckily for everyone I noticed that I was luffing myself to the wrong part of Cornwall and went back to cruising. We missed the Eddystone Light and its associated rocks (isn’t it odd how rocks crowd around lighthouses?) and the sun came out. Then the wind that I had been looking forward to all week died and it was back to motoring. Then it pretended to come back just to make me run around putting the spinnaker up.

As the more nautically informed will have already spotted, no sooner had I done this than the wind died and made the spinnaker look rubbish and slow me down, so I ran around and took it down again. Then it was back to another few more hours motoring, and realising that I wouldn’t get to Falmouth until late.

Some dophins came to mock me. These ones hadn’t read the memo about diving.

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Miles	65
Hours sailing	4
Hours motoring	7