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Introduction
This is the narrative log
of the vessel Megstone’s voyage around the South of Britain, a journey
covering 1569 nautical miles.
We started on Friday 12th
May and returned on July 12th. In all we were away for 59 days,
and this log provides a short description of every days activity. For
statistic lovers the facts are all in the appendices.
Thanks to …
We met a huge number of
people along the way, far to many to list here. For those that gave us
useful local information, help and assistance we would like to take this
opportunity to thank them all, but special mention must be made to:
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Dave Woodall, who loaned
us a selection of his UK waters admiralty charts;
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John Henderson, for
keeping everyone informed of our proress
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Andy Carnduff who
assisted me in getting the boat into the canal
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The skipper and crew of
to vessel Wild Eve, who helped raise the mast at Bowling
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The entire British
Waterways canal crew for getting us through the canal
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The Coxswain at
Portpatrick for his invaluable assistance and the loan of vital missing
charts
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The Harbourmaster of the
Isle of Whithorn for being a great bloke
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Local people at the
Itchenor pub for helping me understand the Chichester Bar.
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Wilkinson Sails, who came
to Dover marina to pick up my torn headsail within 30 minutes of asking
for assistance and returning it fixed later that day at Ramsgate
Notes on the voyage
The time we had allocated
for the trip was a start in mid-April and finishing mid-July, when Mary
had made a commitment to join our daughter in a trip to Sweden. We had
also decided to go clockwise down the east coast, because if we were
running short of time I felt that it was a much pleasanter place to have
to leave the boat on the west coast rather than the east.
On this basis we had
started planning our route down the east coast, easy when you have a
laptop based chart plotting system and you get sent out to Albania on an
EC contract (you
don’t have to carry shedloads of charts around); the planning could be
done there.. With the convenience of the Internet we were also able to
order some supplementary charts and pilots for delivery after we got home.
We didn’t buy full chart coverage as we knew that our friend and fellow
Moody owner Dave Woodall was
prepared to loan us any UK waters Admiralty chart we wanted, but we also
know that they were old and we thought that the Imray’s charts would give
us up to date information. Our advance purchases therefore included pilots
and Imray coverage to Dover (except for the bit between Lowestoft and the
Humber, and as we didn’t really plan to spend much time in this area we
settled for Reeds to give us the necessary information). Our reasoning
here was that we may as well see how it all went first and then buy more
charts as and when we needed them after Dover. We are glad that we didn’t
buy any more – the Imray charts were extremely disappointing.
Go West, not East…
I think it was Dave Woodall
that first pointed out to us that it made more sense to go west to better
utilise the prevailing winds, particularly in the channel and east coast,
and we decided at the last minute to do exactly that - through the Forth
Clyde canal then anticlockwise round the rest, and we only had to suffer
the prevailing winds for the first few hundred miles. (For info. we when
we were in Chichester
Harbour we were told that the prevailing winds in the channel
have, for the past few years, been easterlies).
A late start …
Our trip to Albania put
paid to our planned start date as the earliest we could get home was the
29th April and we had loads of stuff to do to the boat. We have
never worked harder at getting the boat ready or completed it in such a
short time, and we were ready to go on the 10th of May but had
neeped ourselves in the harbour. We eventually set off “out of the harbour
and turn right” on 11th of May 2006 for the short trip to Port
Edgar and the stepping of the mast.
Passage planning and the Detail Devil …
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All our stages were
carefully planned taking account of all information available to us.
This was derived from:
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Entire chart coverage
of the UK (except for two parts of the Irish Sea between the Isle of
Mann and England, which we borrowed from the RNLI at Portpatrick)
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Pilots for all
sections of the UK except for the area Lowestoft to Bridlington
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The 2006 Reeds for
the UK
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A laptop loaded with
chart plotter software and connected to a mouse style GPS receiver
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Megstone’s own
standalone GPS, a Garmin 158
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A GPS repeater fitted
in the cockpit
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In all cases we
carefully planned our passages generally the night before we set out,
paying particular interest on the tidal flows in the area.
To achieve this we took
account of pilot information and Reeds to ensure we understood the local
situation, we
marked up the tidal flows with tide times, chart information from the
plotter and, of course, weather information from the coastguard. Every day
we sailed we updated in pencil the tidal flow diagrams with HW Dover and
HW local and
marked up the tidal flows so we always knew the state of
the tide.
When we had planned in
rough what we wanted to do we then planned the course using the chart
plotter, which gave us GPS coordinates and it also confirmed for us the
best time to start for the fastest voyage. All coordinates were written
down in hard copy and then used to input course information into the GPS
and/or onto the charts, and when that was done the GPS findings were
checked against the plotter.
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The main point behind this
was security of information and ease of use. The chart plotter could go
down (and the laptop frequently crashed) without affecting our course. The
GPS could go down and we still had paper records a hand-held GPS and paper
charts. Real paranoia but safe and if we loaded all information into the
GPS the night before we could concentrate on the day on getting everything
ready to go without worrying where we were going. We also made it a rule
that we would always navigate out of harbours, bays and estuaries using
the pilot information, rather than rely on GPS positions. Thankfully we
never had to use the hand held GPS.
Our own passage rules …
There were really only a few:
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Life jackets in the cockpit and on deck
at all times
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No mast, anchor or sail adjustment
without a harness
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Lifejacket and harness when steering
alone in moderate or rough seas
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No night time sailing
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No setting out in F6 and above
During the course of our passage there
were cases where we broke our own rules, sailing into Weymouth at night
and the planned night time sail from Lowestoft to Spurn Head. We also felt that if we didn’t set out from Portpatrick
in a F6 we’d still be there, and we experienced on several occasions winds
in excess of F7 but never gale F8. In the vast majority of cases the wind
never materialised in the direction or strength predicted in the forecast,
much to our annoyance.
Log
information …
The distance covered on a daily basis was
derived from the GPS, but this was only after the trip through the canal.
At the start of our voyage we discovered that the mechanical log was under
reading by at least 25%, though this changed to approximately right as
time went by. We put this down to over rigorous antifouling on the log
propeller that eventually wore off, but the log finally gave up the ghost
at Exmouth when the cable snapped, so all readings after that had to be
GPS derived, so in order to be consistent all distances became GPS derived
ones. This meant that the log covered distance over the ground,
with any reference to speed being the Speed over the Ground.
Statistics.
Overall statistics, costs, mooring
information and loads more can be found in the appendices.
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