coliholic
New member
Yup, sorry chaps and chapesses but I’m back posting again.
So a quick update as to what I’ve been up to over the past few months.
Having loaded our 28 ft Binliner with as much safety gear as a happy person could possibly want, we departed Southampton just as the sun was rising over the metre arm. It used to be a yardarm but what with metrication and directives from Brussels, the name had been changed. First port of call was going to be Cherbourg, but since we’d left Crumlidge’s article on pilotage on the kitchen table and didn’t have a spare copy, we knew we we’re going to be lucky to make anywhere in France. Pointing the bows at the rising sun and navigating by following a passing ferry, we had a very pleasant journey across the Channel. The only slight fly in the ointment was that the ointment I was using to stop my lips chapping had a fly in it, but that was soon dealt with by dumping the lot overboard.
Cherbourg proved to be a smaller place than I’d imagined and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Royal Yacht Squadron had some moorings there and they all spoke reasonably good English. It was much later that we realised they must have been twinned with Cowes, ‘cos there were loads of places with Cowes in the name. And I never realised the French built hovercraft too.
After sampling the local delicacies of Chicken Tikka Masala and Prawn Dupiasa, we tested the on-board holding tank – this will be the subject of another post at some time in the future and set off on the next leg of our epic adventure.
Having already crossed the Channel much quicker than I’d have thought, we turned left as we came out of Cherbourg and were a bit surprised to find lots of sea still ahead of us. Thinking there must have been a new lake built since the 1974 AA map we were using had been printed, we decided to push on regardless. This proved to be a tiny problem since my wife, who was driving turned to her left, and not my left. In the end though it all got sorted out as we approached St Peter Port. We pulled in to the jetty alongside a ferry called the Pride of Burgundy but they wouldn’t let us raft up alongside. A bit of a strange place though StPP. There was obviously a football match going on somewhere since there were the scores up on the dockside. One said Calais 3 and another Calais 4 so I guess the visiting teams were doing pretty well and thrashing the locals. Perhaps that was why the harbourmaster started shouting at me in some unfathomable local dialect. Well since he wasn’t as pleasant as I’d been led to believe by Dom that these Guernseyites are, we told him where to put his tomatoes and turned right out of the harbour making for Jersey.
It was at this stage that I might have made a bit of an error in my navigation. The worm that had hanging from a thread in the cabin that I was using as a compass ever since the dog chewed through the proper one, seemed to have died and wasn’t pointing in the right direction anymore and after a short while it became apparent that for some unfathomable reason we’d missed Jersey completely and were obviously following the coast to Spain. My wife and I had a bit of a disagreement about the navigation here, since she was sure that the coast should have been on our left if we were heading south, whereas it was on our right. These women just don’t understand about proper nautical terms like port and starboard do they? I told her to forget left and right, and as long as the coast was on the port side of the boat where that pretty green light is, we’d be fine. Looking closer at the map, it seemed to be quite a long way to Gibraltar about four or five inches, though in reality as we approached they seemed to have left off the English spelling and reverted to the Spanish version, Oostende. I reckon this is all part of Tony Blair’s way of dumping Gibraltar on Spain without us all realising, but that’s another subject too.
Gib was a bit of a disappointment though. I’m sure I saw a picture once with a big hill and some apes on it, but no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t find the hill anywhere. But we did see lots of apes all dressed in very strange clothes.
So far we’d found the trip a bit of a disappointment and decided to spice things up a bit by going across the Straights of Gibraltar to Tunisia. The map was a bit useless from this point on since it only went as far as Gibraltar, but working on the basis that “we’d got this far OK, so how hard could it be to guess the next bit”, we just aimed for it and hoped for the best.
Our first taste of Africa and how refreshing and exciting to see the sun rise ahead of us over the port. What a magical place Africa is and they’d even named the port after one in Europe too – they called it Zeebrugge. What a nice touch eh? I guess they must have a long affinity with the French town of Zeebrugge. Maybe the French liberated them the same way they did Algeria. To hear the locals talking in their incomprehensible Arabic language with a spattering of the odd word that we could understand was enlightening to say the least.
Well I guess that concludes the first part of my story. I was planning to submit it to MBY for their waypoint competition, but decided I’d share it with you all first. And just to make sure you’re paying attention, has anyone spotted the little error I made?
<hr width=100% size=1>
So a quick update as to what I’ve been up to over the past few months.
Having loaded our 28 ft Binliner with as much safety gear as a happy person could possibly want, we departed Southampton just as the sun was rising over the metre arm. It used to be a yardarm but what with metrication and directives from Brussels, the name had been changed. First port of call was going to be Cherbourg, but since we’d left Crumlidge’s article on pilotage on the kitchen table and didn’t have a spare copy, we knew we we’re going to be lucky to make anywhere in France. Pointing the bows at the rising sun and navigating by following a passing ferry, we had a very pleasant journey across the Channel. The only slight fly in the ointment was that the ointment I was using to stop my lips chapping had a fly in it, but that was soon dealt with by dumping the lot overboard.
Cherbourg proved to be a smaller place than I’d imagined and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Royal Yacht Squadron had some moorings there and they all spoke reasonably good English. It was much later that we realised they must have been twinned with Cowes, ‘cos there were loads of places with Cowes in the name. And I never realised the French built hovercraft too.
After sampling the local delicacies of Chicken Tikka Masala and Prawn Dupiasa, we tested the on-board holding tank – this will be the subject of another post at some time in the future and set off on the next leg of our epic adventure.
Having already crossed the Channel much quicker than I’d have thought, we turned left as we came out of Cherbourg and were a bit surprised to find lots of sea still ahead of us. Thinking there must have been a new lake built since the 1974 AA map we were using had been printed, we decided to push on regardless. This proved to be a tiny problem since my wife, who was driving turned to her left, and not my left. In the end though it all got sorted out as we approached St Peter Port. We pulled in to the jetty alongside a ferry called the Pride of Burgundy but they wouldn’t let us raft up alongside. A bit of a strange place though StPP. There was obviously a football match going on somewhere since there were the scores up on the dockside. One said Calais 3 and another Calais 4 so I guess the visiting teams were doing pretty well and thrashing the locals. Perhaps that was why the harbourmaster started shouting at me in some unfathomable local dialect. Well since he wasn’t as pleasant as I’d been led to believe by Dom that these Guernseyites are, we told him where to put his tomatoes and turned right out of the harbour making for Jersey.
It was at this stage that I might have made a bit of an error in my navigation. The worm that had hanging from a thread in the cabin that I was using as a compass ever since the dog chewed through the proper one, seemed to have died and wasn’t pointing in the right direction anymore and after a short while it became apparent that for some unfathomable reason we’d missed Jersey completely and were obviously following the coast to Spain. My wife and I had a bit of a disagreement about the navigation here, since she was sure that the coast should have been on our left if we were heading south, whereas it was on our right. These women just don’t understand about proper nautical terms like port and starboard do they? I told her to forget left and right, and as long as the coast was on the port side of the boat where that pretty green light is, we’d be fine. Looking closer at the map, it seemed to be quite a long way to Gibraltar about four or five inches, though in reality as we approached they seemed to have left off the English spelling and reverted to the Spanish version, Oostende. I reckon this is all part of Tony Blair’s way of dumping Gibraltar on Spain without us all realising, but that’s another subject too.
Gib was a bit of a disappointment though. I’m sure I saw a picture once with a big hill and some apes on it, but no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t find the hill anywhere. But we did see lots of apes all dressed in very strange clothes.
So far we’d found the trip a bit of a disappointment and decided to spice things up a bit by going across the Straights of Gibraltar to Tunisia. The map was a bit useless from this point on since it only went as far as Gibraltar, but working on the basis that “we’d got this far OK, so how hard could it be to guess the next bit”, we just aimed for it and hoped for the best.
Our first taste of Africa and how refreshing and exciting to see the sun rise ahead of us over the port. What a magical place Africa is and they’d even named the port after one in Europe too – they called it Zeebrugge. What a nice touch eh? I guess they must have a long affinity with the French town of Zeebrugge. Maybe the French liberated them the same way they did Algeria. To hear the locals talking in their incomprehensible Arabic language with a spattering of the odd word that we could understand was enlightening to say the least.
Well I guess that concludes the first part of my story. I was planning to submit it to MBY for their waypoint competition, but decided I’d share it with you all first. And just to make sure you’re paying attention, has anyone spotted the little error I made?
<hr width=100% size=1>
