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.