Schools & Fools

Those are the only people sailing at this time of year, especially outside of the relatively safe confines of The Solent. It was, therefore, quite apt that on a recent sail across to Cherbourg we only encountered two other yachts in the whole 130 mile round trip. One yacht was another UKSA boat out training and the other was clearly a fool. Since then we've been out in all sorts of weather. Today for example we sailed from Lymington back to Cowes with the wind reaching 55 knots at times which is a good Force 9. Whenever it's rough, windy or throwing it down with rain and we see another yacht, someone is bound to say "schools and fools".

The trip across to Cherbourg was interesting. I may have mentioned in previous posts that we did a Radar course a while back which at the time was really good fun but when it came to sailing across the busy shipping lanes in the English Channel, the training was invaluable. The radar allows us to track up to a maximum of 10 "targets" in order for us to work out if we are in danger of a collision. We thought that 10 targets would be more than enough but when we were actually in the shipping lanes we wanted to track about 15 at times. As usual the business of collision avoidance at night kept us on our toes, we had a few nervous moments to say the least. The skipper was not one of these people that breezed through high pressure situations with an air of calmness - oh no. He seemed to opt for the "instill as much panic in my crew as possible and genuinely seem like life is about to end horribly" style of leadership. It was good to see the contrast between experienced skippers, which we'd had up to this point, and the one that we had for this sea phase though. As is quite often the case you learn more when something goes wrong than when everything works like clockwork.

The yacht that we had for that sea phase was called a Sweden 42 and it's definitely the best make of yacht I've sailed on, apart from Contessa's of course ;) I helmed it for about 2 hours coming across from Cherbourg in a strong wind and good size sea - it sailed fantastically. It's probably the most fun I've had at the wheel of a boat. I've just found out today that I've got the same yacht for my Yachtmaster exam in January, so I'm really pleased with that. I've also found out that I am being examined with perhaps two of the best sailors in our course, one's a Frenchman and the other is Polish (I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere). The exam is a two day grilling in which we take the examiner out in the yacht and he can ask us to do anything that's in the syllabus and ask us questions on anything we've been taught. It's the sort of driving test at sea but lasts for two days. The exam is on the first weekend in January so by the time you've all got back to work after the Christmas break I'll hopefully be a Yachtmaster.

I've spent the last 10 days or so "self skippering". As the name suggests we are given a yacht on a charter basis, without a skipper and we're let loose like toddlers learning to walk. I am pleased to report that we didn't bend it and we didn't hit any other vessel. We did however, ensure that our day was done by 6pm latest, and if we weren't in front of a big fire with pint by 6:15, we'd give ourselves a serious talking to. It was a great couple of weeks, when we needed to make hard decisions (or even easy ones) and there was no one to turn to, we found that we could in fact deal with any situation we were faced with. We lost our engine 3 times, we were faced with some seriously windy conditions and we weren't sure whether to order crisps or peanuts with our 4th pint but it all worked out just dandy.

In a week's time I will be in Gibraltar to meet up with the yacht we're crossing the Atlantic on and then a few days later, we're off. We're hoping to be in Antigua for Christmas Day and then we've got 4 days there before we fly back to London, just in time for New Year's Eve. I'm feeling excited about the trip but also a tad anxious - I guess that's fairly normal though.

I am writing this from an Internet cafe and unable to upload photos, however, I am back in my shore based accommodation tomorrow so I'll put some pictures on then.

I'll update this once more in the next week and then not until I get to Antigua.

TTFN