IAN STEPHEN’S BRITTANY WEBLOG

Another crunch question.

15 September 2008

Michel said it, direct, in English. It was night-time about the change of watch. On this boat, like many good ones, it’s not done to the second. Considerate crew trusts that it’s all going to work out, like an average speed. Or maybe cool guys just aren’t that bothered. We all know we can wake anyone when we need to. If there’s anything worrying or we just need a rest.

You’ve studied all the information, watched predictions of the passing of fronts. Talked to the charming lady who took her Hallberg Rassey (quality Swedish-built yacht) to Ouessant last year and Norway the year before.

She confirms her plan is on the right lines from her own knowledge of many passages down the Irish coast, often towards Brittany. Yes, leave a good bit before the slack, stem a bit of tide at first, out here where it’s not so strong. That way you’ll get the full push when it matters. Andy, you know that down off Arklow it doesn’t flood for 6 and ebb for the same but more like 7 hours one way 5 the other. So you want to get that one right.

And yes she agrees, that westerly, even when it’s strong, should flatten the swell of 2 days of gale pretty quickly.

At the butcher’s the guy who sells us well-hung beef and cuts them to the required thickness, he tells us a boat based here in Howth went down in Biscay last night. A training boat. Lot of folk aboard but they were all lifted off safe. These guys came here for their stuff.

We can see why as he slices the best quality lamb’s liver Guy has seen. Works out a discount on a whole piece of sliced ham. We’re a proper ship being provisioned. We’re planning on 2 nights at sea and food is important to guy, Michel and me.

We did as we planned and it worked for us. Some favour “Cotweb”, I go for “Windfinder”. We needed a more specific forecast than the BBC or general inshore picture to make a decision on whether to aim to go the whole way to Scillies in one bite. We went for it. We’re there now, in St Mary’s harbour and the Wi-fi works on the mooring. The ship’s undersides, slippery again, slid south.

When the engine went off and our boat speed was still more than we needed to catch the next wind shift, Michel relaxed. That’s when he asked the question.

Ian, why did you come with us? You didn’t know us?

En Francais, he says when I start to answer.

I thought I could only make myself understood in French after 3 and before 4 glasses of wine. But I also remember these lucid moments on the night shift on a coastguard watch. Between the fatique, the lartness. Clarity. Wasn’t that the virtue the young Joyce or his character Stephen Hero sought in Portrait of the Artist ….. Claritas

I tell him I trusted the feeling. He said the same with him and Guy. And we have a mutual friend we both respect. Uisdean brought us together. He’s the same with everyone, a guy who hangs around the harbour, a doctor, an admiral – they’re all the same to him. For me that’s important. So if Uisdean thinks you guys are sound…… And I did want to sail to Brittany.

Michel nods. He’s heard enough. He passes me the hand-cream, asks me to remember to rub plenty in. He noticed I wasn’t looking after them too well.

So now the engine is resting. Guy has done wonders. The temperature and revs are steady and the fuel system is clean. Bonnie was plagued with mechanical problems all the road north. She’s in fine fettle now, sailing at 6 knots steady and trying to nudge 7 at times. I plot the course on paper to back up the electronics. We’re doing 6.1 knots steady over the ground. That’s the distance from one fixed position to the next, the miles we’re really covering. It’s all we need.

Guy is going to corner the world market in dolphin shots. He’s grinning from ear to ear like a happy angler. I look at the back of his Nikon and see he’s revitalized every photoshop cliché because anyone can see from this sequence that there is no intervention. Guy has found a secure stance and an anti-vibration lens. He’s caught the orchestration of 3 mammals leaping together and the splashes made across the high swell of St George’s Channel. The gannets are plunging. A Concarnea trawler is blazing blue.

The wind’s west and we’re surging along. The dolphins stay with us, We’re fast enough to play with. The boys have these big sirloins inside us and we go the whole way. I put the Peatbog Faeries on the sound system and the brassy gallus riffs head out over the waters. Out as a counter-rhythm to the fiery fine-reaching of a 30ft Dufour that’s not long had her arse wiped.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

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