new to this

[cefn]

hi the insane button has been pressed and we have bought a 20ft caprice currently in Watchet. This sunday weather permitting we will be taking her to cargreen, does anyone have any advise, how long might it take, how to do this as safly as possible ect. i have very little experiance and last sailed over 30 years ago and never on the sea. Thank you cefn.

 

[TOKOLOSHI]

Only 89 miles ............by road, safest on a trailer then sail at Cargreen.
Its a long trip on a 20 footer and 30 years is a long time since you last sailed! Unless you can find someone with experience to accompany you. Best of luck and enjoy your new yacht!

 

[sarabande]

No. If you want to get the boat to Cargreen, do it by road - couple of hundred squids on the back of a flatbed lorry.

With your experience and a slow boat (the boat will do the trip but you will need lots and lots of benevolent weather windows) it could take a month. And the first leg down the N Devon coast is not filled with easy access bolt-holes. #2 is right.

Transport the boat to Cargreen, and get sailing on the river and out to the Sound, and enjoy it rather than beating yourself to pieces on a big delivery trip in autumn.

 

[bitbaltic]

If this forecast holds Sunday is certainly out of the question in a 20 footer:



Agree with the above, it would be far better to truck the boat to Cargreen. I think this might be more than a couple of hundred pounds though, depending on what you paid for the boat it might be a fair % of its value. A delivery trip along the N Devon coast in autumn certainly needs some thinking about- not un-doable, but perhaps not the ideal re-introduction to sailing after a 30 year gap.

 

[Birdseye]

hi the insane button has been pressed and we have bought a 20ft caprice currently in Watchet. This sunday weather permitting we will be taking her to cargreen, does anyone have any advise, how long might it take, how to do this as safly as possible ect. i have very little experiance and last sailed over 30 years ago and never on the sea. Thank you cefn.

Your post suggests that you are thinking of sailing a new to you 20 footer round lands end after 30 years of not sailing. Thats foolhardy IMO. You might make it but you are likely to make the RNLI statistics. The Sunday forecast for st ives is 27 gusting 34 knots westerly with waves of 4 metres which is survival conditions in any small boat.

trying to be helpful here not critical in any way. Dont do it - its a daft idea. Not just this Sunday but any Sunday in a nw unknown tiny boat with an inexperienced skipper.

 

[cefn]

Thank you all. I did say in post weather permitting and since i first looked it has been getting worse all the time , i have no intention of setting out unless the weather has a 3 day calmer window. The main problems seem to be the north devon and north cornwall coasts which have been claiming lives and wrecking ships ever since we have been building them so i have a healthy respect for that coastline. I love the sea but i know it has no emotion for me and will not save me should i do something foolish.
I can't afford road transport so it will have to be by sea but how long it takes will be down to sea conditions. She will have to be moved from where she is also due to cost and the longer i leave it the less chance of a weather window so i am looking for other things i can do like cardiff or swansea for the winter and down to cargreen next spring, any ideas anyone has of places with cheaper moorings closer would be greatly appreciated. be well all.

 

[bitbaltic]

Thank you all. I did say in post weather permitting and since i first looked it has been getting worse all the time , i have no intention of setting out unless the weather has a 3 day calmer window. The main problems seem to be the north devon and north cornwall coasts which have been claiming lives and wrecking ships ever since we have been building them so i have a healthy respect for that coastline. I love the sea but i know it has no emotion for me and will not save me should i do something foolish.
I can't afford road transport so it will have to be by sea but how long it takes will be down to sea conditions. She will have to be moved from where she is also due to cost and the longer i leave it the less chance of a weather window so i am looking for other things i can do like cardiff or swansea for the winter and down to cargreen next spring, any ideas anyone has of places with cheaper moorings closer would be greatly appreciated. be well all.

The trouble is that if you are looking for cheap moorings, I think you will be looking at swinging moorings. Most of those are owned by individual clubs and most insurers (you have insurance, right?) will require a boat kept on a swinging mooring to be on the hard over the winter anyway. Conversely, a marina berth (or 'club marina', such as Cardiff Bay Yacht Club) will mean your insurers will be happy for you to stay afloat over the winter but it will be more expensive.

Looking at Watchet's charges http://www.watchet-harbour-marina.com/whm_tariff.htm

Their winter 6-month deal (afloat), starting October 1st for your 6.1m boat is going to cost you £645. The good news is that's quite good value. The bad news therefore is that if that is too expensive for you, you are going to struggle anywhere else.

6 months winter deal at Swansea Marina: http://www.swanseamarina.org.uk/marina-users/quotations

£748.

6 months from October at Penarth Quays: http://www.quaymarinas.com/quote-calculator/

£1085.

As I say when it comes to the clubs you are probably going to have to be ashore, not to mention becoming a member which could be a couple of hundred alone. In Cardiff where the clubs have year-round marinas you would find yourself and your boat at the bottom of a waiting list, although I'm sure some CBYC or CYC members on here would be able to advise if they could do anything for you. The best advice is probably to get hold of the BCYA blue book and start ringing around.

As an example, Barry Yacht Club have got some very decent-sounding winter hard storage available (see the thread on here http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?464456-Winter-storage-Laying-up). But looking at their published charges:

http://www.barryyachtclub.co.uk/html/Commercial_Boat_Storage.html

£10 temporary membership
£25 deposit
£110 lift in/out
£549 for six month's storage (6x91.50pcm)

=£694 so more expensive than staying where you are and afloat.

All of these charges are going to be comparable to or more expensive than the cost of road transport, which I would expect to be in the £400-£600 range for a low loader. I would have thought a 20ft boat of this type is trailerable, though. If you could find someone with a suitable trailer it might be quite cheap to get the boat out of Watchet?

In your place I might try and see if there are any deals at Ilfracombe or Appledore so the boat is further west for a start next spring. Perhaps some club members on this thread could suggest possibilities. Or just bite the bullet and truck it now.

You have boat a boat; they are expensive things.....

 

[Sneds]

Sometimes, someone responds with a really useful, in depth, well reasearched post
Well done that man!

 

[cefn]

Thank you. Yes we have third party and wreck recovery insurance now just going to try not to claim on it ;-). Yes boats are far more expensive than i had realised, the list of essentials given to me by my partner up to and including life jakets for the dogs was staggering. my original plan when the weather looked much better was Ilfracombe sun eve anywhere past lands end mon eve and cargreen tues. I work 3 days one week and 4 the next so have lumps of time together to stage the trip, due to lack of planning i was unaware of how few safe places there are on the north devon north cornwall coast. i had not thought of appledore but that is within easy distance from home if we can sail to it so will check out their charges.
If all else fails we have been told of cheap moorings and a friendly club between the seven bridges and we could go there for a month or the winter but that would be a 3 to 4 hour car journey each time i wanted to sail and i need to put lots of time in sailing.
if even that short trip is impossible then i will just have to sell a kidney so she can stay where she is over winter ;-).
thank you all for your help i am greatful i should have waited for a boat closer to plymouth.

 

[bitbaltic]

Okay, re the passage plan:

your max boat speed is a shade over 5 kn and you will not generally get more than 4kn. So:

Watchet to Ilfracombe: 32Nm @4kn = 8 hours at sea.
Ilfracombe to Newlyn (the first port round Lands' End) 112 Nm @4kn = 28 hours at sea.

This should be your first 'ballpark' way of estimating what you can achieve in passage making and you'll straight away see what's wrong with the plan.

Just for the sake of form, let's assume that there was a weather window Sunday-Monday even though there isn't. If I run this plan through software which adds a tidal gain (and loss) I can get the watchet to Ilfracombe leg down to 6.5 hours (but you would have to either leave very early in the morning on Sunday or arrive in the dark). The leg to Newlyn I make 25 hours, sailing through Monday night into Tuesday evening.

It is still a long sail from Newlyn to Plymouth Sound (last time I did it it took all day in a 46 footer with a spinnaker up).

So firstly re. the idea of sailing it round. I'd suggest you go online or to a local chandlers and buy 'passage planning' scale charts covering the ground from Watchet to Plymouth Sound. If your budget is tight go on ebay and buy old ones- for planning work it doesn't matter whether the buoyage on your chart is correct, the land doesn't move and this is about being able to plan (but don't go to sea without up to date charts in some form or other).

Get a book on basic yacht navigation- anything will do off amazon for a penny, provided it covers how to work out an estimated position and course to steer, these basic techniques havent changed for centuries.

e.g: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shell-Guid...d=1474536662&sr=8-5&keywords=yacht+navigation

Get a Portland Plotter and dividers kit off ebay or the chandlers:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-Portl...399662?hash=item568c24a6ae:g:djoAAOSwZVlXvGQ9

Get some tide tables e.g from visitmyharbour.com.

Read the book and it will tell you how to plan passages on paper uisng these tools, estimate where you can go in sails of reasonable length, and this will start to tell you what sort of weather window, or successions of windows, you will need to sail the boat round. You could do the same by signing up for an RYA Day Skipper Theory course (which would be wise) but if budget is tight you can teach yourself the basics cheaply. Either way you are going to find that you need something like a week of very mild weather to get a boat like yours round to Plymouth, stopping (probably) in Ilfracombe, Appledore, Padstow, St Ives and Newlyn, to make it reasonable daylight sails.

Your chances of getting that at this time of year are probably quite low, and you have to add in that you don't know how the boat handles, or what her wind limits are- do you know how many reefs she has for example?- and on top of that your sailing is going to be rusty.

So you might find yourself planning passages for next spring- but at least you're doing something positive and taking the first steps towards getting the boat where you want it to be. (not to mention that you will be a hundred times the sailor you set out as when you do get the boat round). Anyway, the point of rehearsing all this is not to knock you but to help you see the risks that would be posed by going to sea without preperation- perhaps you might have set off this Sunday if there was 48 hours of weather in it, for instance, which would have led to disappointment at best and perhaps much worse- and to give you some positive ideas on how to move forward towards the goal of getting the boat to Cargreen.

In the meantime you should try and sail as much as you can for sure. A trip up between the Severn Bridges is quite do-able for you this Autumn. I would suggest you buy an almanac (this year's ones might be getting cheap now, try the Reeds Western Almanac) to properly understand the locking constraints. You are not going to make it between the bridges in one tide from Watchet with a boat speed of 4 kn, so you are probably not going to be able to do it in a single trip. You will find you need to aim for Portishead on the first tide and get up between the bridges the day after. Options might include leaving Watchet before low water, anchoring off and then going for Portishead, before going up-channel on the day/tide after; or going from Watchet to Cardiff on the first tide and then up channel on the second tide.

A final piece of advice would be to contact the RNLI for a sea check on the boat. This is completely free and they are not going to impound the boat or something like that if you are missing some safety gear. They will send one of their shorebased coastal saftey officers round, probably from Minehead, and he will sit with you and go through what you want to do with the boat, what safety gear it has, and what he would recommend you need and importantly do not need. It will allow you to target your spending in a tight budget and save you wasting money perhaps on things you don't need (to be honest I am thinking of dog lifejackets, plenty of dogs cruise without- perhaps those could wait until you are cruising in Plymouth and you could spend the money on human safety especially as your dogs' sailing might be limited this autumn. I am guessing there might be other things like this on your list). I would strongly urge you to do this before you set out:

http://rnli.org/safety/respect-the-water/face-to-face-advice/Pages/Advice-on-board.aspx

Best wishes and good luck with it all.

Cheers

 

[ribdriver]

If she's s bilge keel and you're really stuck, pop her on the slipway, join watchet boat owners assoc and put her in the yard there. They've got a 4 T tractor/ trailer unit which costs peanuts, and the membership fees and yard fees are v cheap also. It will buy you some time if needed.

 

[Yellow Ballad]

I'm sure you've already looked into it but have a look at road transport on Shiply. Yours should sit on a car trailer and providing you can get someone to lift it on and off, you'll get people throwing quotes at you. It's free to get a quote, just sign up.

I bet you could get it moved for £300, possibly less.

 

[tatali0n]

If all else fails we have been told of cheap moorings and a friendly club between the seven bridges and we could go there for a month or the winter but that would be a 3 to 4 hour car journey each time i wanted to sail and i need to put lots of time in sailing.

Watchet Boat Owners Association sounds very tempting. Watchet is closer to you, and a lovely place to sail out of, as long as you take the tides seriously. You could also look at Porlock Weir a bit further west perhaps?

You do need to put a lot of time into sailing, and you'll only manage that if you have the boat near to hand. You'll love sailing around Plymouth, once you get her there. It's one of my favourite sailing areas.

if even that short trip is impossible then i will just have to sell a kidney so she can stay where she is over winter ;-).

The club between the bridges you're thinking of is Chepstow and District Yacht Club in St Pierres Pill. They are indeed a very friendly club and very reasonably priced moorings. St Pierres Pill is in reach of Watchet, but it'd take you two or three days sailing to get up there. Break it down into bite sizes chunks, plan both the journey and the weather, go via Barry (or Cardiff), Portishead then St Pierres.

You could do it in two hops, but personally, given your relative lack of current experience, I'd split it in to three shorter ones. Six hours is a long time to be tossed and thrown about out on the Bristol Channel if you're new to it.

The trouble with CDYC, and Barry and Cardiff for that matter is that they're all on the other side of the Severn Bridge.

thank you all for your help i am greatful i should have waited for a boat closer to plymouth.

Perhaps, but we've all got to take the plunge at some point. Just keep your ambitions realistic and stay very cautious. You have to take the tides and waters around these parts very, very seriously. Read, digest and follow all of Bitbaltic's advice, he's written an awful lot of good sense here.

I really would give up on the idea of sailing your boat around to Cargreen, certainly this year. Much better to either find somewhere to keep it locally until you get a bit more experience and have time to work out what you and the boat are actually capable of, or beg, steal, borrow or hire a road trailer and tow her home.

 

[tatali0n]

Oh, and another thought. If you're going to sail, here or anywhere, sort yourself out some kind of gps / plotter. Run Navionics on your mobile, or better yet, a tablet, or get the visitmyharbour.com package.

You still need to learn how to read a chart, plot a course, and all that other stuff that we consider to be good seamanship, but being able to look at a screen and get absolute, unequivocal confirmation of where you are right now, where you're going, how fast and when you're going to get there is utterly invaluable.

And far from expensive these days

 

[mattonthesea]

+1 for all the advice here. The circumstances of the Channel really do dictate what you can do and when.

The plus side is that the people of the Channel are helpful and friendly.

 

[john_morris_uk]

Our boat comes out on the 10th October and you can have my old Almanac for free after next week. It's the full Reeds Almanac so its got all the tidal stream data and pilotage for the whole of the UK and Europe. I'm in Plymouth on the 08th and again on the 10th October. Just arrange to meet me to collect it and it will last you until January 1st 2017.

Please don't set off round Lands End in a 20' boat at this time of year unless the weather is VERY nice.

 

[drakes drum]

Cefn. You have a pm

 

[[70521]]

I bought my first boat on the Bristol Channel and gave sailing it round some though; she was brought over to the Exe on a flatbed.

A new to you boat + you have not sailed for 30 years = recipy for disaster.

 

[PCUK]

What about keeping it on a trailer at home?

 

[graham]

Speak to the staff at Watchet.In my experience they are very helpful.

They may know a local person with a trailer who could transport it by road for you.

Time and again I have seen people in your position get into trouble trying to get their new (to them)boats home by sea driven on by financial considerations rather than seamanlike ones.

The sea passage you propose requires a well found yacht with experienced crew and gentle weather.