The small town of Lezardrieux was very pleasant and it was a shame to leave behind the excellent patisserie, but Ann wanted us to begin our journey back to England. The obvious next stop was St. Peter Port again where we could refuel with diesel at 56p per litre. The weather forecast for the week ahead was dire apart from this morning. I checked the tides and realised that, unless we left no later than 6:00 am we would be pushing to Guernsey against a strong tide, so we got up at 5:00 am. We thought that this was early but later discovered that the yachts had left at 4:00 am!
Watching the sun rise as we motored down the estuary was magical. However, from Lezardrieux it is nearly ten miles before you are really at sea and the swell was quite big. I had plotted an alternative run into Treguier, if the sea was to rough, but we decided to continue and I set the speed at a reasonably comfortable 16 knots.
At sea, in the English Channel, there are basically two types of wave: wind waves and swell. Wind waves are short and choppy and have ‘white horses’ as the wind increases above force 4. Swell waves tend to be higher, but much further apart, and may have travelled for hundreds of miles, from storms out in the Atlantic Ocean. Today, unusually, there was only swell but it increased as we got further out to sea and it was hitting our port quarter (back left hand side). This meant that the waves were trying to turn us sideways on and could cause us to roll severely. The autopilot could not cope with this so I went on to hand steering. The Guernsey VHF later said that the swell was about 3 to 5 feet high. However, when two or three waves came together they must have been twice as high as that. I concentrated on keeping the boat pointing towards Guernsey but making sure we were not sideways to the next wave. This meant looking left and anticipating what it would do when it hit us. On occasions, our speed increased to 19 knots as we headed down the front of a wave and then decreased to 12 knots as we clawed our way up the back of it with only a view of the sky as the boat reared upwards. Ann later said that grabbing the whisky bottle and vanishing beneath a duvet below had attractions. However, she stuck with it and Jomima coped extremely well with just a bit of help from me.
Watching the sun rise as we motored down the estuary was magical. However, from Lezardrieux it is nearly ten miles before you are really at sea and the swell was quite big. I had plotted an alternative run into Treguier, if the sea was to rough, but we decided to continue and I set the speed at a reasonably comfortable 16 knots.
At sea, in the English Channel, there are basically two types of wave: wind waves and swell. Wind waves are short and choppy and have ‘white horses’ as the wind increases above force 4. Swell waves tend to be higher, but much further apart, and may have travelled for hundreds of miles, from storms out in the Atlantic Ocean. Today, unusually, there was only swell but it increased as we got further out to sea and it was hitting our port quarter (back left hand side). This meant that the waves were trying to turn us sideways on and could cause us to roll severely. The autopilot could not cope with this so I went on to hand steering. The Guernsey VHF later said that the swell was about 3 to 5 feet high. However, when two or three waves came together they must have been twice as high as that. I concentrated on keeping the boat pointing towards Guernsey but making sure we were not sideways to the next wave. This meant looking left and anticipating what it would do when it hit us. On occasions, our speed increased to 19 knots as we headed down the front of a wave and then decreased to 12 knots as we clawed our way up the back of it with only a view of the sky as the boat reared upwards. Ann later said that grabbing the whisky bottle and vanishing beneath a duvet below had attractions. However, she stuck with it and Jomima coped extremely well with just a bit of help from me.
Once we moved into the shelter of Guernsey the swell abated and I was able to leave the helm to Ann while I ran to the heads to relieve the pressure in my bladder – something that I had not been able to do for the past three hours. We arrived safely in St. Peter Port and headed for the refuelling berth, where I found I could not switch off the port engine. There are no spark plugs on a diesel engine and switching off the ignition has no effect. It is stopped by a servo pulling on a lever to cut off the diesel in the fuel pump. A 4p knut had dropped off and detached the servo so I stopped it by hand and relaxed after an ‘interesting’ journey.
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