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    Bristol to the Blackwater: Robinetta, #7
    Bristol to the Blackwater: Robinetta, #7
    Bristol to the Blackwater: Robinetta, #7
    Ebook205 pages2 hours

    Bristol to the Blackwater: Robinetta, #7

    By Alison Cable and Julian Cable

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    About this ebook

    After a winter in Bristol Julian and Alison Cable set out to bring their elderly gaff cutter Robinetta back to the East Coast of England after five sailing seasons going round the British Isles. There were still places to explore on the way, including the Brittany coastline. That was so long as they could get their 7m long yacht across the English Channel.

    Inspired by the song "Spanish Ladies" they decided to head from Scilly to Ushant, then spend as much time as possible exploring the Brittany coastline and attending the Temp Fête at Douarnenez before heading back home to the river Blackwater in Essex.

    This is the story of how they accomplished their mission in the summer of 2018, a summer when the weather was not always as forecast!


     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAJ and Family
    Release dateNov 22, 2018
    ISBN9781386894858
    Bristol to the Blackwater: Robinetta, #7

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      Book preview

      Bristol to the Blackwater - Alison Cable

      Introduction

      Robinetta needed a lot of work doing over the winter of 2017-8. Scott Metcalfe, North Wales OGA President and boat builder, had diagnosed a leak in the bow as a scarf joint failure in the stem post. So we had that refastened. The main deck beam was rotten so we had a new one fitted. The fore hatch was also replaced, and rain had got into the cockpit plywood so that had to be rebuilt again. The mast was refinished and varnished, and the decks and hull professionally repainted. Even the anti-foul got done by the yard. However there was still plenty for us to do.

      Once Robinetta was back in the water Alison spent six weeks driving down to Bristol and back nearly every week to get Robinetta ready for the season.

      Meanwhile our plans were firming up. There were two fixed dates on our calendar. The first was the Douarnenez Temps Fête in Brittany at the end of July and the second was the OGA55 celebration at the Folly Inn on the Isle of Wight in mid August. We had left Cowes heading east at the end of OGA50 so when we got to OGA55 we would have completed our circumnavigation of the British Isles in exactly 5 years. After that we wanted to get Robinetta back to the East Coast. We were looking forward to having her only an hour’s drive from home!

      The festivals gave a shape to our plans and it was looking like another big year. Since 2015 we’ve got into the swing of having several two or three week cruises with gaps of around a month back home. I get to go to work and Alison tends to be busy with family commitments. This year looked similar but for the first time we would be leaving the Anglophone world and needing to plan boat storage in Brittany and transport to and from there.

      I wrote a good percentage of the blog posts this year, so to make it easier to read we’ve edited the whole book into my voice. As usual Alison wrote a lot of the words, took many of the pictures, and does all the work of turning the blog into a book.

      Julian Cable

      Planning and Preparation

      Sailing up the Bristol Channel last autumn on the Welsh side was easy. There are good marinas and one just takes the flood up the channel and arrives at high water.

      Coming down channel means taking the ebb and arriving at low water. On the English side the charts show few, if any, harbours with access at all states of the tide so I wanted to explore them by land first.

      So once we had a launch date for Robinetta, and it was on a Monday, we came up with a plan to spend Friday in the yard getting all the shrouds and halyards onto the mast and stay near Bristol on Friday night. Then we could explore Somerset, Devon and Cornwall over the weekend and be back in Bristol on Sunday night. Only Alison could help with the launch on Monday; I had to fly to Spain on business so I bought a train ticket from Bristol to Gatwick.

      Then the 'Beast from the East' and 'Storm Emma' made their presence felt. Those reading from a place distant in time or space from the UK in March 2018 will need a little explanation. The 'Beast' was a persistent east wind that brought blizzard conditions to many parts of the British Isles. Emma came up from the Azores and put further energy into the system.

      The weather warnings for the south west got up to a Met Office Red Alert, which means danger to life, and we would have thought twice about going in a Yellow.

      I looked at the web cams on the M4 late Thursday night and early Friday morning and it all looked passable. There were no real problems reported on the M25 either. So we decided to go at least as far as Bristol.

      It was fine. Every stage looked just as it had on the cameras.

      The yard was covered in snow but everything was OK. Alison dressed the mast while I fitted the new anchor light and made sure the electrics to it were sound. We left quite early and checked the weather to see if it was safe to carry on westward.

      We set the car radio to pick up BBC local radio traffic reports. We could hear really bad things going on on in Wiltshire and adjoining parts of Somerset, and in south Devon but we heard nothing about where we wanted to go.

      So we headed on west to Burnham-on-Sea where we had a hotel room booked. They rang to say they couldn't feed us dinner as the chef was snowbound but that otherwise it was fine. We stopped off at a supermarket and picked up food to eat in the room.

      On Saturday morning we had another look at the weather and decided it was safe to try for Watchet. The driving was fine, until we got to the marina where we got stuck in a snow drift, but the locals got us out again. It is a really friendly place.

      We hadn't heard anything on the radio about Porlock but the road towards it was closed so we did a big detour to Bideford and then up to Appledore and then another big detour around the roadworks on the A39 between there and Bude.

      Not having heard a reason not to we snuck down to Boscastle before heading in to Padstow. Now we did hear traffic reports about Lynmouth and the terrible problems they were having there. We were glad our Porlock detour had also bypassed Lynmouth.

      So we got to see four harbours on the Saturday and learned things about each one that one would not get from the pilot books.

      We struck really lucky in Padstow and got to the harbour at high water which meant the harbour master was on duty. So we had a great chat to him and got instructions for coming in, recent news about the state of the Doom Bar and a proper understanding that we will be able to leave Robinetta there for a while.

      We had dinner at Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant, which was nice although the staff were really green. We learned a little about Padstow and it’s ‘Obby ‘Oss festival on the 1st May.

      On Sunday we went to Port Isaac and Bude and Ilfracombe. We met some sailors in Bude who gave us heaps of local knowledge about Bude itself and other places. They confirmed that the only really safe place to go if the weather gets up and you are out is Lundy Island.

      This little car trip felt very much like a sea voyage. We had to plan and re-plan every step of the way and react to changing weather conditions. We had to make sure that we never went past a point of no-return without knowing what the conditions would be like. We got to places when the official advice was to stay home.

      We've seen boats coming in to harbour because they'd heard a gale warning. We've passed them on our way out because we'd looked at the weather in detail and knew the bad stuff was further south.

      The devil is in the detail. But so are the calm seas and fair winds. Local knowledge, whether from personal observation, local radio, seasoned sailors or harbour masters is absolutely vital and making good use of it is the key to going places and arriving safely.

      Or we could just stay at home. I don't think Robinetta would appreciate that.

      This is what we discovered on our reconnaissance, listed from east to west.

      Watchet

      Watchet is a privately owned marina. The village is nice and the harbour front excellent. The chandlers is a café and there is a pub and a library. There is a boat museum up the hill and Cecil Sharp collected many sea shanties from ‘Yankee Jack’, the town’s most famous sailor.

      The harbour is only accessible about an hour either side of high water and when we visited had about 10 feet of mud making it almost closed. It was due to be dredged.

      It looks a great place to stop.

      Ilfracombe

      Drying Marina in a run-down area of town. Worth missing.

      Appledore

      Nowhere to go in. Possible to tie up against the wall and dry-out. Wall a bit rough.

      Bude

      Amazing lock in the middle of the beach. Accessible with 2-3 days notice at high water. Good along-side moorings once inside canal.

      Possible to come into the lock at high water and tie up to the walls if arriving when unmanned. Clean sandy bottom for drying out on.

      Boscastle

      Tiny. Good for popping in for an ice cream. Not an overnight stop. Dangerous in bad weather.

      We had amazing and unusual weather conditions when we visited, and I ended up taking a lot of pictures.

      Port Isaac

      Drying sandy harbour. Pretty, but not a good place for a keel boat.

      Rock

      Nice place, but if you can get here, you can get to Padstow.

      Padstow

      Locked in marina. Not as busy as the web-site threatens and potentially problematic since it doesn't take bookings. This is unlikely to be a problem in May. The Harbour Master was very friendly and helpful. He wanted us to realise that the Doom Bar can be challenging in quite calm conditions. The entrance is well buoyed. Yellow buoys are not visitors moorings! Enter and leave near high water but it should be OK to get in and out of the estuary above half-tide in calm conditions.

      Planning

      Our exploration of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall had given us some ideas for the Bristol Channel but we still needed to work out how we were going to get to and from Brittany. We went to the shanty festival in Paimpol a few years ago so I knew the big pilot cutters went directly from Falmouth to north Brittany and we had sailed back via the Channel Islands to Weymouth. But both those options meant a long detour up and then back down the English Channel.

      There is a famous sea song called Spanish Ladies which the Walker children sing in some of the Swallows and Amazons books. It probably dates from the Napoleonic wars and includes the line From Ushant to Scilly is thirty five leagues. The song lists the major headlands encountered in a sail up the English Channel. A league is supposed to be the distance one can walk in an hour. Robinetta sails at about walking speed so 35 leagues would probably be 35 hours! So I started wondering if we could do the reverse trip from Scilly to Ushant. Ushant (Ouessant in French) is an Island off the coast of Brittany and quite near to Douarnenez.

      I mentioned this to Mike Beckett, who sails the gorgeous Nobby yacht Bonita, and he didn’t think it was silly but suggested we needed a life raft and AIS (Automatic Identification System) for safety. This was sound advice and I researched life raft hire and AIS as well as trying to understand the likely weather.

      There are two major shipping lanes to worry about – one on the north side of the Channel connecting Ireland and north America to Europe and another on the south side near Ushant coming up from Africa. Given that there was no possibility we could out pace any cargo ship it would definitely be a good idea if they knew we were there and how slowly we were going. We had to cross the channel at some point so AIS was now something I wanted.

      Life raft hire was quite easy but we would have it cluttering the boat up all summer. We would only need a life raft if we were hit by something, if the boat started leaking or if the weather turned bad. We should be able to prevent the first two of those and avoid the third so in the end we didn’t bother.

      I did some weather planning and the data indicated May was really promising. The strongest winds were likely to be north-north-west and anything else should be reasonably calm.

      So I came up with a ‘Plan A’ for a trip down the Bristol Channel in April, then a long hop over to Brittany in May with the summer exploring Brittany before heading to Cowes in August.

      Of course plans need contingencies so if we got stuck on the English side of the Channel in May ‘Plan B’ could leave us in Falmouth or Plymouth.

      So the first part was now decided. Towards the end of April we would head down to Padstow for the 'Obby 'Oss

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