Part I In the beginning - Bereshit, or maybe Genesis...

In the beginning - Bereshit *, or maybe you'd prefer Genesis...

Sailing on Kazara in Poole harbour - circa 1966

So where do I start?

I wanted to start a blog to share the sailing experiences I've had recently plus some from the past and that I'm going to have going forward; I know that some of you find it hard to understand the immense pleasure I get from sailing.  I'm about to embark on some 'blue water' sailing and I'm hoping to cross the Atlantic in November. I've always enjoyed writing, so what better way to fill those R & R moments aboard. But please don't worry, future updates will be sooo much shorter than this first epic 😊.

Well having just sailed back to Lymington from Muxia in north west Spain, I had plenty of time on board a Discovery 55 to reflect on what I want from my sailing in future.  I enjoyed this pristine boat which was owned by the skipper; it's a state-of-the-art, fast, cruising yacht and just three years old. 

The Discovery 55, a truly beautiful yacht, built on the Solent

But for me, the whole experience was not what it could and should have been. A four day voyage, on a gorgeous boat, with perfect sailing weather does not equal contentment if the people you're sailing with have completely different agendas and more importantly, incompatible personalities...

My sailing and boating started when I was about five years old.  I was lucky, my father was a first-class engineer and he turned his hand to building boats and sailing soon became his main hobby. Every other weekend during those summers back in the '60s, we'd be off to Poole harbour to sail on Kazara, usually with my brother Andy and Dad's boating partner - 'Uncle Doug'. 

We spent so many summer weekends down in Poole harbour and at Mitchell's boat yard, usually getting up to mischief. Whenever I smell anti-fouling paint nowadays, it takes me back to those blissful times playing under an array of colourful hulls of all shapes and sizes - all propped-up on a pot-holed gravel hard - what lucky kids we were! I continued sailing with my Dad and Andy into my late thirties on their various boats, kept in Mudeford harbour.

A colleague in my first proper sales job when I was 19 was Dennis. He was a keen sailor and he'd owned several yachts in the past but latterly, he chartered boats for his colleagues to enjoy several times a year.  We often sailed from Lymington on a First 41 called Devon Dawn, sailing across to Cherbourg, the Channel Islands and all of the south west coast line on many occasions.  I used to organise the motley crews and Dennis took care of all boating matters. However, mutiny was much closer to our boat than on the Bounty when he roused us from our bunks at 4am. Dennis Bell was a brilliant skipper and a great friend but sadly he passed away a couple of years into his retirement some 22 years ago. He'd just moved into a beautiful new house with his lovely wife Angela near Torquay. God bless you Dennis, the best skipper I've ever sailed with...

Top left - Dennis on the helm, top right & bottom centre - Steve doing likewise. Bottom left - Whitbread racer Merit in background with Kerry, Andy and me on the bow, Bottom right - Dennis always liked to dress for dinner lol

My good friend Marcus from Dublin, chartered two identical 40+ foot Jeanneau yachts from Kinsale back in '97.  One was crewed by the British 'scoundrels' and the other by a carefully selected group of his Irish buddies.  We sailed raced every nautical mile of the way around to Dingle and back. The stretch from Castletownshend to the fastnet has to be the most beautiful coastline in the world, bar none! Such great pubs, so much craic and such great sailing. When the weather is decent, without doubt, no better place to sail!

Marcus has since bought his own boat called Phtha, an Albin Vega 27 which he now keeps in the Greek islands.  We had two special weeks together back in April and were blessed with sunshine and fair winds most days.  We sailed from Preveza to Aegina, some 220nm over about 10 days, sailing down through the Lefkas canal into the Ionian sea and down through the Corinth canal into the Aegean sea, stopping off at some truly beautiful ports along our route.

The lovely Phtha, moored stern-on as is the custom in Greece, with Marcus preparing her to sail through that iconic canal

Leaving the Rion-Antirion bridge behind, it's spans the Gulf of Corinth and is Europe's largest 

So I'm used to sailing with friends and colleagues and having a real blast even when the sailing conditions are challenging. Sailing to me was and will hopefully be, a time of adventure, fun and achievement.  

Back to the Discovery 55

The owner / skipper just wanted his boat back in the UK to have various repairs carried out at the Berthon marina.  His first mate, let's call him Dick, suffered from a severe case of small-man syndrome. He used every occasion requiring instructions, to bellow his orders like a sergeant-major, even when we were within spitting distance of each other. I endured five days of this lip curling crap, cringing at the bellowed orders from little Dick. I reminded him upon my departure from our voyage, 'It's not what you say Dick, it's how you say it... ' Bereshit no, total bearshit!'

The forecast when we left Muxia was for sixes gusting sevens but we were going, no debate. I didn't have a problem with that and the first 36 hours were a roller coaster ride but I loved it. Wow, could that boat shift!  With heavily reefed sails, we were still crashing along at 8 knots most of the way with her bow just carving through a 2m swell.  Awesome!

When we were passing Brest, a French customs boat, the size of a frigate appeared out of nowhere - it obviously had its AIS systems turned off.  They launched a rib and six of them came speeding up alongside us.  Four of them jumped aboard and searched our boat. No Fido in the boarding party, so they weren't looking for drugs and their search of the boat lasted less than 3 minutes. People - that's what they were looking for me reckons.  

A spot of fishing. Another note to diary : take my own tackle in future - no weights...

Our third crew member was German, also living in Geneva and unbeknown to me, they'd all sailed with each other before. But the poor guy couldn't even keep a sip of water down during the first 48 hours.  But when he finally surfaced, it soon became clear to me that he was a very experienced sailor, plus he washed up for me after every meal!  He was a lovely guy but he didn't really approve of how I tied knots. This is also a standing joke with Marcus too, but fair play to him, he was cool with them there knots of mine 😉.

I was recruited by the skipper as a watch leader and cook. I made some bread, various cakes, puddings plus Thai and Lebanese meals that all went down well with the crew and they didn't re-emerge later.

So what lessons did I learn from this trip?  

lesson 1 - try to get know your skipper in advance

I was interviewed by the skipper and his wife over Skype before he took me on. Thinking back, she did most of the talking even though she wasn't part of the crew.  He had the most chronic case of OCD I've ever encountered and he scolded me on numerous occasions for the most trivial things. But he was a decent guy, he just didn't have much empathy and struggled to start a conversation with any of us.

lesson 2 - understand exactly what duties 'watch keeping' entails

Everything on the boat was automated, even the foresails tacked automatically!  The fore-deck was constantly awash with water but luckily there was no need to move from the cockpit which remained completely devoid of any of Lady Biscay's finest.  The boat just powered through the waves on auto-helm. 

The weather leaving Muxia was quite 'brisk' but not a problem for me because I've been blessed with a strong sea tum. I'd done my homework on this skipper before I left Blighty so I had complete confidence in him from the outset.

lesson 3 - delivery or pleasure?

There are plenty of blue water sailing opportunities advertised on https://oceancrewlink.com/. Some are fee paying and some just require the crew to share living costs. However, the delivery voyages typically serve only one purpose; getting from A to B as quickly as possible - with no frills (or fun???) From my own experiences and quite rightly, most pleasure skippers won't venture out if the forecast is force six or above. 

But 'Hired Delivery Skippers' apparently don't exhibit that same sense of caution, probably because they get paid a fixed fee and just want the job completed as fast as possible. So in future, I'll hopefully have time to do my homework on any skipper before agreeing to sail with him/her.

Finally unless you're sailing with friends or people you know well, don't expect too much from your shipmates.  Hopefully you can find some common ground and enjoy crewing a boat with strangers as I did earlier this year. I volunteered to crew aboard Tall Ship Pelican of London, on a short delivery trip from Bristol to Dublin with 23 complete strangers.

TS Pelican in Bristol docks before our voyage to Dublin

I made three new friends aboard Pelican and two of them I've met up with subsequently. And believe me, helming on that square rigger, with nine sails filled under a moonlit sky - it just doesn't get any better!  I just wish my Dad could also have experienced this, he too would have been deeply moved.

lesson 4 - cooking 'nice' food on board

Assume nothing!  When you find the chopping board is the size of a beer mat, the knives are worse than useless and every cupboard is crammed with tins of stuff you'd struggle to eat even stranded on a desert island - get rid of it before casting off!   If you go to the trouble of preparing well in advance, you end up, as I did, stuffing bits all over the bloody boat. Cooking becomes far more challenging when you're playing 'hunt the whisk' for half an hour on your hands and knees. Tedium, 'Bereshit , no even more Bearshit'

And if you want to bake cakes and more importantly bread, take a thermometer as I did.  I soon found out that the maximum temperature of the oven was only 170⁰C and it wasn't uniform.  The front half of the oven was about 30⁰C cooler than the back. It was capable of burning one side of a quiche inside 10 minutes.  So it was very disappointing for baking bread, cakes and pastries and without constant 'plate spinning', it would have been impossible to cook anything nice.  

Porky cooks at sea in the beautiful galley but on the verge of jettisoning the cooker over the side...

The superb music and TV systems remained silent throughout because sadly we were not allowed to use them 🤔... Mind you, I did enjoy testing the sterio system at 6am when we arrived in Guernsey and the skipper had gone ashore. Note to diary: bring your own music in future.  But above deck, this super yacht really was equipped with the very best of everything.  

I've now prepared various menus and a spreadsheet that automatically dumps a shopping list for the dishes chosen. This should make provisioning for my next voyage to Las Palmas considerably easier.

Final lesson - tolerance at all times

When you're living and working in such a confined space for several days or even weeks, your patience will be severely tested. You simply can't afford to create disharmony on any boat - period. As I found out, you might end up disliking a member of the crew but just use restraint, count to ten and move on. Those who know me well will laugh at this because I'm not really known for my patience. Sad little Dick pushed me to the very limits of my tolerance on several occasions but I held back and bit my tongue.  

Andy - you'd have been proud of your bro!

Finally, why 'Porky'? Simple, I was born in the year of the pig... 

Next post

Cascais here I come... (future posts will be considerably shorter you'll be pleased to hear).

The next post on this blog will hopefully be (weather depending) on the morning of Saturday 12th October from Lymington, prior to my departure on Salamander, a beautiful Nauticat 521 on route to the start of the Atlantic ARC 2019 rally in Las Palmas.

Thank you for reading this, I hope you will continue to follow my progress.

I'll keep you posted on here....

Your feedback, comments and questions will be much appreciated either publicly on this blog below or privately via email:smithfjeremy@gmail.com

Please remember, I won't have any phone signal while we're sailing...

* Bereshit is a hebrew word meaning 'in the beginning' found in the Torah