St Peter Port to Dartmouth

Well, having spent the last two Guernsey pound notes on critical stuff (two chocolate torsades in the Waitrose café) we had to leave of course. The weather was looking better back in the UK and seemed to be settling down so there was no need to hang around the Channel Islands to avoid getting very wet.

As the Scilly Islands area was still shown as “rough” seas, we decided to have a shorter trip to Dartmouth and head west from there later on. The channel was said to be “moderate becoming slight” so a very benign forecast too. Just in case of any issues, the RNLI seemed to be increasing the lifeboat cover in St Peter Port. Initially we thought we were seeing double:

Reassuring though. Of course they were really taking the St Peter Port boat away for maintenance and delivering one of the reserve fleet as cover.

The route to Dartmouth is kind of NW (ish). In other words, if we could use the full 6 hours of a west going tide in the channel we would cover some free distance to the west as we would not be out there for a full 6 hours eastbound. That meant leaving about 5 am though. Hum. Still, it did let us (Captain, crew and Patrick) enjoy a stunning sunrise as we headed up the Little Russell channel out of St Peter Port and up the west coast of Guernsey from the pilot house:

It looked even better from outside:

For those people who stalked us via AIS (eg using Marine traffic website) if you are not used to boating then you might have thought we were a bit drunk as we didn’t follow a straight line across to Dartmouth. Honest, no alcohol had passed our parched lips and the drift was intentional. We just let the tide take us to the west and then as it turned, bring us back a little to the East. Hence the picture on the PC screen which shows a cross track (ie off the direct course) error of over 6 miles.  The red line is the direct route, you can see where we were (red boat) and the little green triangles are the big commercial guys we like to avoid:

Patrick became a little agitated though. He saw the big cross track error and hadn't figured that it would get cancelled out when the tide turned a few hours later. When the captain went to check the engine room, Patrick decided that it was time to sort things out and took control by grabbing the follow-up lever (again, for the non-boaters, that is a simple way to steer the boat using a little lever rather than the steering wheel) and disconnecting the autopilot which he thought was not working properly:

Explaining that all was OK to Patrick and reassuring him seemed a strange task mid-channel.  It probably was. So glad you were not there to witness this embarrassing episode for all of us.

Sadly the sun went and grey cloud appeared as we neared Dartmouth. The normally stunning entrance looked a little downbeat:

Overall a 70 mile trip, just over 11 hours. No maintenance news for you – the machinery was very happy. However, our lovely Windows navigation PC threw a total wobbly as we approached the UK, refusing to read the chart details from the plotter where the data is held. This is new. The ***** PC has played plenty of other tricks recently but this is entirely new and most irritating. We still love Windows deeply. Of course, the thing worked fine once we were berthed in Dartmouth and it had no stored errors to help us find the needle in the Microsoft haystack.

More importantly, it was a very nice trip. The swell was about 2 meters high on the port bow but the stabilisers were not taxed by that. As we got closer to the land, the waves heaped up a little and (a rarity) the captain actually adjusted the stabiliser response up by one notch. We normally run the boat on the lowest possible response level and as we still had another 10 notches to go, we were not too worried….  The only irritation apart from the PC was that you have to call the customs “Yachtline” to report your return and it is a premium rate number. Cheeky HMRC, very cheeky. Most people don’t bother with this now but we have always done it “just in case”.  Blowing 52p on the call might save a whole bunch of trouble.

St Helier to St Peter Port

Our last few days in Jersey were spent catching up on some polishing (superstructure, there is a lot of it...), walking and testing out the local coffee shop. All stressful stuff.

The drying moorings in the harbour for local boats looked very cosy indeed. How on earth do you wriggle your way out of the far corner of the last row when the tide comes in and they are all afloat? Maybe up the ramp and onto a road trailer?

One place that we didn't visit was the rather grand Royal yacht hotel:

Think a stay there would have made our diesel bill look comparatively small.

We decided to stay in St Helier for longer than planned simply because the weather here was WAY better than back in the UK. Way better. Then we saw the UK forecast and weather warnings for Saturday saying heavy thunderstorms and flash flooding. So tempting.

As Wednesday was pretty blowy (and probably Saturday will be too) we decided to can the trip back to the UK and instead head for Guernsey on Thursday. Leaving just as the cill into the marina opened around 9am meant a civilised departure time and the chance to arrive at Guernsey early afternoon too. Guernsey is of course a closer jumping off point for any channel crossing too.

There was a good old swell / slop left from the strong winds on Wednesday evening. A smaller yacht that left with us had a pretty tough time heading west (ie into the waves) and turned back. Here is Elizabeth castle, on the way out of the harbour area:

This time we followed the inside passage of course, nodding gently into the waves. You really notice how much difference the full fuel (and water today - the crew has a phobia about running out of water) tanks make to the handling, roll frequency, pitching motion etc in bumpy stuff. When empty, you just use the stabilisers a bit more!  Passing Noirmont, you get a good view of the World War II defences like this rangefinding tower:

This time, we could get a picture of Corbiere lighthouse in the sun though - much nicer even if the sea was a bit bumpier:

Rounding Corbiere, the wave height increased as the swell reached the shallower areas and hit the tide that was running quite hard around the island. As we turned towards Guernsey we had 2 metre waves on the port bow with the odd 3 metre friend. The boat was very happy, and some new autopilot settings that the captain had tinkered with whilst in Jersey seemed to be working well (for the interested, a little more counter rudder and a slightly faster response to help when the autopilot is squabbling with the stabilisers for directional control). There is always something to optimise / tinker with if you care to do so - boys and their toys stuff...

As we passed Corbiere, the local Lifeboat which had been out on a "shout" earlier passed us returning to the harbour:

As you can see, with the benefit of excellent local knowledge and lots of horsepower, he was running through some narrow passages between the rocky outcrops in a way that we would not!

As we approached Guernsey, so it got a bit busy. The Ruby Princess passenger liner was anchored off, the Condor Express fast cat ferry was heading out of the harbour for Jersey and the French cat ferry Marin Marie from Granville was holding off the harbour, waiting to enter. The Condor ferry and the liner were a little further apart than this picture suggests of course:

The observant might notice a little Aquastar motorboat plugging along just ahead of the Condor Ferry. It looked like a strange animal was closing in on its lunch. There was a lovely VHF radio conversation when the St Peter Port traffic control man asked the French ferry if their AIS was switched on. (AIS for the non boaters is the neat device that tells other boats equipped with suitable stuff where he is, where he is going, how fast etc etc. It is compulsory for commercial craft like the ferry). The reply was "we know it is broken and it is being swapped next week". Funny, we knew it was broken well over a week ago when we saw them out to sea and commented on the lack of AIS. Rather lax approach for a passenger ferry operator??

The Condor decided not to eat the little motorboat but changed course to come close to us instead. You might recall this "pretty" thing entering Weymouth from our earlier post when we spent time there. Here she is doing 30 knots (and lord knows how many litres per hour of fuel!):

There was plenty of space on the harbour pontoons and (shock horror) since we were here 8 days ago, they have linked 2 of them to the shore with a long walkway! It becomes more marina like and less harbour like here. Luckily we were on a "remote" pontoon and so needed to get the dinghy out so we could raid Waitrose. Back enjoying the standard view of Castle Cornet:

The trip is only about 30 miles so not too taxing. No maintenance news (actually that is wrong - the coolant level in the genset expansion bottle got topped up. It had a coolant change a month or so ago and after a few hours running, the bubbles have worked their way out of the system). No other fun technical news so sorry all you tekkies out there. We could have a discussion about autopilot settings but we fear that only a small and very sad subset of the tekkies would be interested. You know who you are......