Cherbourg and back
Stephen S writes…
The time had come to do my long awaited offshore checkout. Hoping for fairly simple E/W wind patterns I had planned with my mentor, Ron, to make the simplest crossing to Cherbourg and back. As I had timed the crossing to almost coincide with the longest day of the year I knew that – if all went according to plan – we would be crossing in daylight so we wouldn’t need an augmented crew to cover a watch system but rather allow crew to take a rest as and when required throughout the day. I brought along a couple of my Family and Friends – a good opportunity to try and sell the benefits of joining Tops’l. Both Olly and Miranda have considerable crewing experience including offshore racing so I knew they would make an excellent and reliable crew.
I had already spent many hours pouring over my Reeve-Fowkes to try and remind myself of how to do the passage plan so by the time the weather forecast came into range I had everything ready to drop into an Excel sheet to calculate an approximate course to steer from Bembridge Ledge to Cherbourg. The first crossing never looked in doubt but an area of low pressure was passing through on the rest day we had planned that caused the forecast for the return to jump around. I soon realised that I should stop pestering my crew with updates as the forecast was changing every 4 hours and we still were a week away from the trip.
Tides in the Solent were going to be set strongly against us by breakfast time so the crew were happy to get to the boat on Friday evening to trundle down to Gosport so that we were ready for an early start the next morning. Forced to eat the spinach and feta filo pie I had made for supper, it was not surprising that they mutineed and insisted that we take a taxi to the nearest pub playing the Lions’ match.
We were up at dawn the following morning and headed out to Bembridge Ledge under full sail about 30 minutes behind schedule in a F3 easterly, perfect visibility and unusually smooth sea state. The crossing to Cherbourg does not pass through a TSS and has no other significant hazards so it was essentially plain sailing all the way. I had plotted the hourly position I was expecting to make on my Navionics and my track passed within a whisker of each, which was deeply satisfying! We kept a good watch on battery voltage but as the wind strength was somewhat variable, we motor-sailed for a couple of hours mid-channel to maintain the average 6knts I’d planned on. This happened to coincided with the heavier traffic giving us the adjustment option in case of close approaches.
We were pleasantly surprised at how little time you are actually out of sight of land on a clear day – it seemed that the highest point of the Isle of Wight had only just dipped below the horizon when we could see the French coastline appear to our South. Pilotage at Cherbourg was very straightforward – we entered the eastern entrance to keep away from the ferries. I hadn’t realised that there was a roll of alphabet flags so we had improvised our Q flag with a yellow dishcloth! Cherbourg Chantereyne marina won’t allow you to book a visitor berth so we had a rather long wait on the arrivals pontoon (“A”). I was getting a bit worried that we were going to have a bad night as the very pleasant conditions of the crossing had turned into oppressive heat blowing off the land.
Once on the berth, a trip to the local hostelry was very much on the cards…as well as showers, passport stamping with the PAF and dinner at the yacht club. All more than satisfactory. We made our way back to the boat as the sun went down for some well deserved sleep. Fortunately in the night the hot wind turned to a cool one and we had a mostly restful night and a lie in. By the next morning the forecast for our return was clear – a healthy westerly most of the way, possibly strengthening to F6 as we approach the Isle of Wight. My lovely crew pointed out that under these conditions, we should look at whether crossing back to the Needles would be better than heading for the eastern end of the island and beating back up the Solent to Portsmouth. I spent a happy hour updating my passage plan accordingly with the rather pleasing result that we wouldn’t have to make such an early start.
Our rest day was unremarkable except for the fact that my food planning had ended on arrival and so we had not taken account of the fact that almost everything was shut on a Sunday. We managed to find a boulangerie to buy some supplementary baguettes for our return trip and a restaurant (Café de Paris) where we not only had lunch but also bought the essential magnum of Bordeaux and a whole Pont-l’Évêque to be the centre piece of our supper on the boat. With our passports stamped by the PAF once more it was time for dinner and a relatively early night.
In the night we had thunder and rain but by the morning things had mostly cleared up though the visibility wasn’t quite as good as the first day and the seas were much chunkier. We set off with one reef in and made excellent time. As forecast, the wind did begin to strengthen once we passed the halfway point. A rather large container ship kindly adjusted course to accommodate us and once she was out of the way we took the opportunity of being under motor to put in another reef (the kink in our track). We then set off once again.
As on the way out, we were passing through all my waypoints but we were making much better speed than in the plan so that rather than arriving an hour after the tide had turned to flow East up the Solent from the Needles, we arrived nearer slack tide. By now the wind was gusting well into the 30s and the seas were lumpy and confused as we neared the Needles. We had to make some course adjustment too as, arriving early, we had missed an hour of tide that would have carried us further East.
We then had a 2 hour dead run up the Solent, which was a lot of fun. Rather than putting the preventor on, we depowered the mainsail by releasing the vang and hiking up the boom with the topping lift so that we could pretty much centre it while using the reefed headsail to do most of the work.
With this combination and gentle gybes, keeping mid channel with the strongest tide and occasionally surfing down the larger waves, we achieved a SOG of over 11knts for a few seconds which helped our average SOG of over 7knts!
Conditions back in Portsmouth Harbour were much more clement and we settled back into Carina’s berth at Port Solent in warm sunshine.