Chapter 29

How can previously experienced capable people suddenly turn helpless? Bill and Litara were suddenly full of questions about how I intended to achieve the impossible.

"Not my job!" Was the limit of my explanation. "You two have a boat to build and documentaries to make so do what you do best and ask the experts. I've got to sail to Spain hoping that by the time I get back you can tell me whether I have a voyage around the world or shelf stacking in Tesco's as a future."

It was tempting to then start pumping Bill about the inheritance scheme he'd dreamed up but I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Would it help on the trip to Bilboa knowing I had thousands of pounds to come one day? With my luck my inheritance would turn out to be his childhood teddybear!

Sunday was the day for moving aboard Blue Horizon and mum decided that nobody would survive the voyage unless she fed them up so she was including Alistair and Jill on a family table already crowded by the addition of Bill and Grandma Tina.

While Mum and my sister were preparing dinner Dad was ferrying my things to the boat adding my electrical circuit testing and soldering kit from his workshop, 'just in case'. Bill and Grandma Tina then met us on Blue Horizon 'just to check' I hadn't forgotten the sextant and the year 2000 almanac to calculate my star sights. For a while the men were left to their own devices while Jill and I made up the beds and stowed provisions, and Grandma read, enjoyed a bit of sun in the cockpit, but we all gathered to follow our route on the paper charts starting just before high tide next morning. at dawn. It took a call from mum to dad's mobile before a halt was called for a safari in search of mum's roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (traditional amongst Welsh, Afro Caribbean Polynesians).

With the trip so near I'd have liked to spend time with my friends but simply called Serena instead. "No problem Venus! You hang up and I'll phone round so we can see this boat you're sailing. Be there at 4 pm!" Absolutely everyone turned up and a huge number of photos were taken of the boat, the people, the people waving goodbye to the boat and the people waving goodbye to the people ashore from the boat. Then the shore people went home and Alistair, Jill and I went below before turning in for an early night - be honest how many friends does anyone have who will get up at 5 am to wave them off on their holidays (which it was for Alistair and Jill).

"Eeah! Cold, cold , cold , cold…" … the delights of sailing luxury yachts are similar to those of camping with cold washes and clothing dictated by practicality not fashion (in my case a fetching sweat suit in a shade of pink that ensured its destination of a 'For Sale' bin, teamed with very old deck shoes). 05:45 we were leaving the lock from the marina, with Jill and I playing skivvy to Alistair's impression of Captain Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.

'Navy fashion' dictates that everything has its own place on a boat and there is a right way of doing everything. This is not always for mysterious technical reasons but so that in the middle of the night in the pitch black you can find the 'whatsit' stowed or untie the knot tied by somebody else long before. Alistair's Bligh impression I felt was down to his nervousness, an impression reinforced by Jill's wink as she passed me taking the sail covers to the sail locker in the bows of the boat as I coiled and stowed the mooring lines and marina electrical power cable in the aft lazarette (a large deep locker at the stern of the boat).

If this were one of those derring-do stories we would be beating out of the Bristol Channel against fierce headwinds but it isn't so in the real world we motored through the day and night with barely any wind other than a 'sea breeze' in the afternoon which allowed me haul up the mainsail for a couple of hours only to drop it again as the breeze died passing the Isle of Lundy. We didn't even have to steer as an electric autopilot did that.

Watches were non-traditional with, theoretically, Alistair doing 06:00 to 14:00, Jill 14:00 to 22:00 and me 22:00 to 06:00. The person going off watch was allowed to sleep but the person awaiting their watch was on-hand for work. In practice that meant Jill cooked lunch, I dinner and Alistair pointed to where the cereals were in the morning!

There simply wasn't much to do with the engine only going off for 6 hours the second day when a southerly breeze of 12-15 knots allowed us to raise (unroll in the case of the foresails) all plain sail for a few hours before anchoring for the night in New Grimbsy Sound between Tresco and Bryher in the Scilly Isles.

I could now understand Litara's point that sea voyages gave very little action per day for a film maker! 160 nautical miles (times by 1.15 = 185 land miles) in 34 hours of very easy motor sailing was hardly going to hold a television audience watching. They could I suppose watch me put my hair up with elastic combs ; the said newly bought combs shoot over the side of the boat as it got caught when I was raising the mainsail and Jill French braiding my hair as an alternative. There was the scene of Alistair throwing up over the side on the first evening which might have been the smell of my cottage pie but I prefer to think was diesel fumes when a breeze pushed the exhaust over the deck. All in all it was just another day in Paradise

That evening after a steak and oven chips dinner Alistair and Jill watched a DVD while I sat in the cockpit reading Joshua Slocum's: Sailing Alone Around the World and thinking, 'did I really want this'? Some lifestyles become tedious, others tedious with flashes of terror. Sailing was tedious, with hard work, discomfort, more than its share of terror but also with moments that were sublime