Blue Moon's trip around the UK

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Yacht cruising is all about how you deal with the wrong weather, and I’ve had a pretty good run so far. I’ve moaned about not enough wind, but all you have to do there is bend down and press the starter button on your brand new engine and off you go again. But too much wind, from the wrong direction, that’s game over. And that’s a lesson ex-racers like me have to learn: hiking a heavy keelboat into mountainous seas for a couple of beats on a racecourse is fun when you’re twenty (and unnecessarily macho after that); hand steering a 3.5 tonne cruiser, no matter how ‘fast’, into 20+ knots for eight hours on end is not fun. I know, because I have been forced to do it (and for the next eight, thank you). So I reckon when you’re not forced to do it, you shouldn’t.

Yesterday was a taste of things to come: the advertised south-easterly which would have wafted me and the assymetric spinnaker up the north Cornish coast failed to materialise so it was gribble at 3 knots or motor at 6. Guess which. I have a passge to make now. At least the sun shone, and to cheat the tide I had the excuse to go camera in hand right into Woolacombe Bay past the amusing Baggy Point and the beaches we used to have fantastic family holidays on. It was a lovely afternoon, if freezing cold, then out towards Bull Point where we used to go for windy walks and which is regarded as the beginning of the Bristol Channel and…

WHAM!

one minute 7 knots, the next 25. It was like walking into a brick wall. The temperature dropped even more, the waves became mountainous instantly and out of nowhere three huge cargo ships appeared, each apparently about to run me down. Welcome to the Bristol Channel.

I’d been planning to go into Ilfracombe which is pretty much the only proper harbour in all of North Devon, but in easterly wind it’s really not at all sheltered so after beating into a rather rough wind-against-tide 20+ knots for a couple of hours I tucked into a tiny place called Watermouth Cove. This involves steering at what appears to be a wall of rock which at the last minute opens up to reveal a narrow sort of canyon at the end of which there are moorings. This made me feel very smug as you can only really come in here if you have a lifting keel as well as nerves of steel as it dries at low water. I anchored at the end where it’s slightly less shallow but was too wet and cold and miserable to take a picture. Luckily it’s on the front cover of the pilot book:

I suspect because it’s the only nice place in the whole Bristol Channel. The guide is so desperate for nice places it includes Bewdley for heavens sake, which is in Worcesteshire and undeniably a very nice place, but you can’t sail there.

---

Today was the fateful day. I poked my nose out through that tiny gap at 0600 this morning. Yes, 0600. This is because in the Bristol Channel the tide is so vicious you can only go with it, and it inconveniently started going the right way at silly o’clock. I’d worked out that if I left then, the now guaranteed (even the inshore waters forecast guaranteed it) south-easterly meant I could make it to Penarth in one tide. Thence to Portishead and Bristol.

Not a chance. The same easterly as yesterday, this time without sunshine. A huge black ship was lurking waiting for me to try and run me down. This time I was ready – reef in, sails flat, leaky underwater window no longer leaking. But no chance. Bang on the nose. I was laying Porthcawl not Penarth. Look at the map – it was a 30 mile beat from where I was. The tide would turn against me and stop me dead. I would spend the afternoon and evening tacking to and fro off Barry Island.

I headed for the only – and I mean only – safe haven for thirty miles either side. Swansea. Yes, Swansea in Wales. Quite a long way into Wales. It was either that or back into Watermouth Bloody Cove. On a broad reach at 8 knots I was there in time for elevenses, not that anyone offered me any, but the chap next door did take my lines and offer me his electriciy and agreed I’d made the right decision. “Most times you just can’t go up there, so we never try”, he said, sensibly.

I so wanted to go under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, to moor up next to the SS Great Britain. But now I think about it I was mad: only a few crazy people sail in the Bristol Channel becuase there’s nowhere worth going and most of the time you can’t get there anyway. And I suddenly realised, as I arrived at Swansea Marina and the guy who met me chatted away for fully five minutes before he got around to opening the lock, that anywhere in Wales is nicer than Bristol, which is horribly grungey and full of people who think they’re really cool and alternative in spite of the fact they all work for Lloyds Bank

So I say: bugger Bristol, and its Channel. I’m going to enjoy South Wales.

---

Miles	69
Hours sailing	4
Hours motoring	9

---

Miles	33
Hours sailing	4
Hours motoring	2