IAN STEPHEN’S BRITTANY WEBLOG

Arrival Scillies

13 September 2008


You blink as you sense an activity. Two guys up. I did a longish stint before handing over to Michel. A skipper needs the last watch. He’ll want to do the pilotage into St Mary’s. it’s not dark now. No stars, through the hatch. Looks like sun again. Fine morning. The boat is still under sail but slower. Her cloth was well powered up during the night. Carrying us through a few contrary seas against a long groundswell. Wind and sea held few surprises – pretty much as we plotted. So we didn’t need our safety margin . We planned a few hours grace in case steeper seas slowed us or the tide didn’t kick in as predicted. So we cruised slowly round St Mary’s fishing as we went.

As ever the key to a longer passage is the time you set sail, to get the best advantage of wind and tide to get you down the road. This one’s worked for us. But, better than that, we’re all grinning because the sailing was exhilarating and the dolphins rode with us for hours. I dozed between catching the September sun striking the picture-book lighthouses. These Isles are not as awesome as the bare coasts of Ouessant but there’s plenty of wrecks punctuating the soundings on the chart.

Michael pretends to be amazed as I stir. Monsieur Ian, he says, and in French, tell me exactly what it is you are doing aboard this ship?

This is not Stornoway? I reply, managing that far in one of his languages. He shakes his head. Scillies.

Too much wine, I say. Not for the first time. Last time this happened I woke in Buenos Aries.

Two creel boats buzz around. They both carry mizzens (steadying sail carried at the rear of the boat) as the Danish fishermen nearly always do. Beside the lighthouses they make the arrival scene an Alfred Wallis painting. I plotted the distance off the coast at St Ives at one point of the two night sail. You think of W S Graham, Greenock’s rep among Hepworth and Nicholson et al. You think of the natural connections along the sea-roads. I was told Dublin has a significant collection of St Ives artists and so of course does Stromness at the Pier.

Maybe we’ll see auxiliary or mainsails soon on larger ships. They won’t be squares or triangles. And of course they’ll be carbon this or Kevlar that.

There was no sail on the trawler I altered course for last night. A significant shift, as dictated by the Rule, enough to get our skipper out of his bunk at speed. He saw the electric plot, observed me swing back to the line and returned to bed a happy man. His yacht, small enough for open water crossings, was right down there, clearing St George’s Channel.

So the fiction of our plot done in the harbour of departure, internet-assisted, became the history marked by a dotted red trace of a sensor. Fact summarised by pixels.

This is another fact, the last noted in my personal log of this stage of our voyage.

0940. Nil result on sea-bass or mackerel or pollack or coalfish or anything else from the line our skipper trolled. Thus the breakfast/lunch/supper consisted of Irish lamb’s liver marinaded in parsley, olive-oil and Tabasco, fried with smoked bacon, onions and apple slices.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

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