webcraft
Well-known member
I have a friend who is considerably older and madder than me. He recently bought a 27ft boat in Sweden with the intention of sailing it back to Scotland. He intended to sail last Monday, and I was sufficiently concerned about the conditions en route to phone him Monday morning and recommend he stay put in Norway. He said he was definitely leaving though and had a good handle on the weather. He's done equally mad things before, so I maybe didn't try as hard as I should have to dissuade him, maybe remind him he was a lot younger then.
He is single-handed and the boat has, AFAIK, no safety equipment other than a handheld VHF. It also has hank-on headsails (with a storm jib available) and no self-steering, although my friend says the boat tracks well and he has had considerable success with sheet-to-tiller steering. I expressed my concerns about that working in the strong downwind conditions he was likely to encounter on day 2 and day 3 of the passage, and suggested he might need to get the storm jib on early to avoid foredeck work in bad conditions. I should perhaps have been stronger in expressing my reservations, but as far as I know he set off from the Farsund area on Monday morning, heading nominally for Peterhead or anywhere on the E. Coast. I suspect conditions will have driven him further South, and he had been talking about taking the boat to Sonehaven or Montrose. (He has family there).
Conditions en-route involved a developing low centred between Stavanger and Peterhead, with the strongest winds on the W. side affecting days 2 and three assuming a three day passage. Conditions were likely to be 25 - 30kts N/NW with 2 - 2.5m seas. All quite surviveable, no actual gales forecast, shipping forecast giving 4s to 6s. It's been five days now, so even if he spent the worst 48 hours hove to I would expect him to have limped into an East Coast port by now and phoned home. (Phone goes straight to voicemail)
His two children have been in touch with me and are obviously concerned. So far I have reassured them that it is too early to worry, but I am thinking that if there is no news by this afternoon it might be time to inform the coastguard. Boat is a canoe-sterned 27ft Allegro, sage green hull and white topsides, and I believe she is called Stockholms Blomma (Flower of Stockholm), although this does not seem to be marked on the hull anywhere.
He is single-handed and the boat has, AFAIK, no safety equipment other than a handheld VHF. It also has hank-on headsails (with a storm jib available) and no self-steering, although my friend says the boat tracks well and he has had considerable success with sheet-to-tiller steering. I expressed my concerns about that working in the strong downwind conditions he was likely to encounter on day 2 and day 3 of the passage, and suggested he might need to get the storm jib on early to avoid foredeck work in bad conditions. I should perhaps have been stronger in expressing my reservations, but as far as I know he set off from the Farsund area on Monday morning, heading nominally for Peterhead or anywhere on the E. Coast. I suspect conditions will have driven him further South, and he had been talking about taking the boat to Sonehaven or Montrose. (He has family there).
Conditions en-route involved a developing low centred between Stavanger and Peterhead, with the strongest winds on the W. side affecting days 2 and three assuming a three day passage. Conditions were likely to be 25 - 30kts N/NW with 2 - 2.5m seas. All quite surviveable, no actual gales forecast, shipping forecast giving 4s to 6s. It's been five days now, so even if he spent the worst 48 hours hove to I would expect him to have limped into an East Coast port by now and phoned home. (Phone goes straight to voicemail)
His two children have been in touch with me and are obviously concerned. So far I have reassured them that it is too early to worry, but I am thinking that if there is no news by this afternoon it might be time to inform the coastguard. Boat is a canoe-sterned 27ft Allegro, sage green hull and white topsides, and I believe she is called Stockholms Blomma (Flower of Stockholm), although this does not seem to be marked on the hull anywhere.
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