I am aware how privileged I am as a club member to be able to sail as a sport, however, when I sail west and study our beautiful coastline from a view that very few people are able to enjoy then the thrill goes up a few more notches.
My Late Summer Cruise story started a little earlier than the other club members as I had arranged for the compass to be adjusted in the morning so Andy Morrill joined me to greet the Compass Guru and we turned circle after circle in the river whilst she corrected the errors. The new deviation card is in the chart table.
Back to the main event: this year the Late Summer Cruise took us west. The winds did as Skipper Graham Strudwick requested: They came from the east pushing us with the tide as we headed out on a warm September afternoon and shot down to Swanage on spring tides. We anchored for a few hours to watch a storm pass north of us over the coast, rumbling over the hills as we ate dinner and slept. At 2330 the tide turned to enable us to pick up our passage to Salcombe. We had a great run, passing south of Portland overfalls, and across Lyme Bay with dolphins joining us on the way. We passed Prawle Point early in the afternoon and entered the estuary for Salcombe harbour, admiring the very beautiful and expensive houses on the way! We shooed a few ribs out of the way and manoeuvred onto the town quay pontoon, our early arrival left us plenty of time to wander the quaint alleyways; eat ice cream and visit the yacht club for a well earned glass of wine. That evening Peter Dollin introduced us to his card game which left the winners losers, and the losers laughing. The game then became a staple diet for our evenings with forfeits being handed out to the lucky ‘winners’. Peter Makin was completely unable to ‘lose’ and could be seen regularly cleaning the heads!
The next day we were due to sail around the coast to Newton Creek, however we had an electrical fault caused by inadvertently picking up an unmarked loose lobster pot in Swanage bay so this needed sorting out first. With the delay, we decided to amble back east in the afternoon to Dartmouth accompanied by more dolphins and arriving on the town quay at 1700. Dartmouth is a beautiful town, made even more approachable when arriving by boat where the coloured houses bleed up the hillside beyond the fortressed entrance to the naturally deep harbour and the train running along the east shore. The men on the boat were fascinated by the train, as only boys can be :-) After a shower at the YC, we roamed the charming back streets and came across a charming small restaurant where we overindulged with good food and wine.
Continuing to head back east, our next overnight port was due to be Weymouth and we set off in the morning with good winds behind us and dozens of dolphins once again delighting us on our journey. We had not been going long when the engine spluttered a couple of times and we immediately stopped it to run a series of checks. We could find nothing obviously wrong, but were concerned that the recently adjusted fuel gauge may not be reading correctly and we may be lower on fuel than it indicated, so we filled the tank with the can of extra fuel onboard, shook out a reef and sailed well for the rest of the day, though our course was further south than we had hoped so we were a little later entering our port of refuge – Portland – who couldn’t have provided a better welcome. We restarted the engine as we entered the harbour and the harbour master put us on the fuel pontoon at the entrance. Though it turned out the the fuel gauge was correct and the spluttering was cause by a blockage on the 90 degree angle to the fuel cut off valve.
We departed Portland and sailed back into the Solent, stopping at Bucklers Hard as we knew a storm was due in the following day. We decided to opt for a walk into Beaulieu and a New Forest Cream tea on our penultimate cruise day rather than battle the elements back to Universal Marina. So we saved the short hop home for the last day when the storm had blown through.
We met some incredible people on the way: James Ketchell, the British adventurer. The first and only person to have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, successfully summited Mount Everest and cycled 18,000 miles around the world, in what the media dubbed ‘The Ultimate Triathlon’. In 2019 he flew his open-cockpit gyroplane over 24,000 nautical miles around the world, in 175 days to set the first Fédération Aéronautique Internationale ratified circumnavigation for an aircraft of it’s type. And we ave him a push off the pontoon at Portland as he set off to sail around the world singlehanded!
We also met James Holbrook from Telford in Shropshire, who set off on 1st January 2023 on a 11,000 mile walk around the coast of Britain to raise awareness of men’s mental health. He said he would also raise money for six charities that were close to his heart, and aims to complete the journey by February next year. He was doing it carrying a 25kg backpack containing a tent and camping equipment. The former soldier said he had suffered from his own mental health problems and said that the walk was helping him ‘find himself again’. We bought him a beer in the Master Builders Pub and donated on his fundraising page.
They were filming Villages by the Sea in Bucklers Hard and we also met the film crew in the bar. If you watch the episode on the 9th December you may catch a few of Eagles crew members misbehaving in the background!
