I left Ponta Delgada in the afternoon on 8 August and cleared the western end of the island that evening. I worked my way roughly northwards under sail and motor until 2.15 in the morning on 14 August when, after a few hours sitting in the dark in a flat calm with the sails down, I finally picked up the wind that would carry me home, although it was fairly weak at first, and from the South-South-West.
That afternoon a large whale swam under my boat without me noticing until its back arched through the surface 20 yards off my port side. There are loads of whales and dolphins in those seas, but this was certainly my closest whale encounter to date, or the closest one I witnessed anyway – who knows how close I may have come to them in the dark, and while asleep!
In the next few days, the wind picked up significantly and moved more into the West. At one point it blew consistently at 20 to 25 knots for most of a night, which meant I had to stay on deck keeping an eye on things. Nothing broke. With around 400 miles to go, I started seeing a lot more shipping, traveling in both directions. The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world, with monster cargo ships and tankers heading to and from Southampton, Rotterdam and other big ports. I didn’t trust myself to wake up for the AIS alarm, as it goes off in the cockpit rather than the cabin, so I reduced my sleeps from an hour to half an hour on the basis that this would give me enough time to avoid a head-on collision with a ship picked up at my usual range of 12 miles. This tactic is a bit of a vicious circle though; sleeping for shorter spells makes you much more tired, and consequently more likely to sleep through an alarm, which I have done a couple of times.
One of the highlights of my whole travels came at seven in the morning on 18 August, when a pod of around 20 pilot whales played around the boat for half an hour. They completely surrounded us, and at one point there were four abreast in the starboard bow-wave. It seemed like the adult ones hung back astern, and it was mostly the younger ones that came forward to play. Some of them were still ten to twelve feet long though, so a good bit bigger than dolphins. And very loud; I could clearly hear them whistling to each other. I managed to film some of it too.
On 19 August, in the western approaches to the channel, I had the wind pretty much dead astern, and I had to gybe a couple of times to avoid ships. As night fell, it got very foggy, and I was entirely reliant on AIS. The fog seemed to affect the AIS range, with ships appearing on my screen as little as five miles away. This might sound like a lot, but the fog didn’t seem to affect the speed at which ships were heading up and down the channel, so our combined speeds in head-on situations didn’t give me much time to alter course, particularly given that I usually had three or four ships in my vicinity, and I wasn’t exactly at my most decisive by this point. I had to take pretty drastic evasive action a couple of times to avoid getting mown down, which was fairly scary.
After finally getting into the very welcome lee of the Lizard peninsula in very unwelcome freezing fog at around three in the morning, I motored North for four hours or so, keeping well clear of the Manacles rocks and loads of big ships lying at anchor. The fog lifted as I passed the St Anthony Head lighthouse at dawn and came into the harbour in a flat calm. I initially anchored, slept for about an hour, then moved into Falmouth Haven when space opened up. My dad came to meet me, and treated me to a richly deserved pint and fish and chips in a pub overlooking the harbour.
So that’s the end of my ocean sailing, for now at least. My current plan is to head for Dartmouth tomorrow, then possibly Weymouth on Saturday or Sunday, or I might try to make it all the way to the Solent if the wind is right. I’m hoping to go to Yarmouth and/or Gosport on my way through, and I’m currently thinking that I will probably head through the Dover straits from Brighton, although that might change. It looks like the Westerly winds may not last, so I may end up taking a bit longer over this than planned, as has been my habit throughout! I should hopefully be back in London some time in mid-September anyway. At some point, I will edit together some highlights from the hours of footage I’ve filmed, and post it here. Love to all!
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