The plan was to sail around the Bell Rock, possibly swimming to it if the weather was fair – an early start in the sailing boat Columbine (yes it was named before the massacre) out of Anstruther Easter was agreed on with a good ten hour sailing out into the North Sea and returning down the Fife coast. The weather was looking good – everything was set and I had made it to Anstruther Fish Shop when there wasn’t the hour long queue and it was open – yum.
I woke early and Calum, owner of Columbine – Calumbine perhaps, and I munched breakfast bagels and packed the car. Anstruther has vertiginous walls and I passed down our goodies for the expedition on a rope. A passing salty seaman cautioned ‘You’d better start f*cking running – the tide is f*cking moving fast’ but Calum had already taken the yacht out from the inner drying harbour (leaving boats perched on mud) so we could finish loading in the outer harbour. So we would be ok. Sensible seamen.
All on board and engine going we motored out from the harbour wall and promptly stuck fast blocking both the inner harbour entrance and the lifeboat ramp. Another salty seaman kindly rowed to our assistance and with a rope attached to the harbour wall we tried winching ourselves off the mudflat to no avail – we were going to be there for hours – at least we brought plenty of coffee and food.
A succession of salty seaman and tourists wandered to the edge of the harbour wall to see the sight of stuck sailors sipping coffee – ‘What happened?’ they asked – I replied ‘Too Many Pies!’, that seemed to satisfy their curiousity. Others shouted – ‘You aren’t the first to get stuck and you won’t be the last’ which was nice – unless they thought it was us going to get stuck again another day. The outer harbour became totally dry, fortunately we had a bilge keel so the boat rested nicely on the mud. I thought I would make it to shore in case supplies ran low until the next high tide in 6 hours – jumped off the boat and promptly sunk up to the top of my Dubarry boots in mud. I managed to pull myself back in covering the decks, which Calum had spent the last hour cleaning, with a fresh coating of sludge. I was now fearing that if I did go for a swim at the Bell Rock, Calum might not be there when I got back.
It was interesting to see what actual channel there was in the Outer Harbour – it was mostly flat mud apart from a slight incline towards the harbour wall where fishing boats sat on their keels out of the mud. Another example of “don’t believe the chart depths as sand and mud do move and accumulate after they have been printed”
So coffee, gossip, a few sea shanties and the tide started to come back in again. I reduced the loading of the boat by abandoning it with me and my belly and muddy boots into the inflatable tender and rowed towards the harbour wall. We tied up the boat and Calum was trying to get the outboard engine working again, it was playing up now, as I chatted with a local cyclist who told me that a couple of weeks previously someone else did the same but they didn’t have a bilge keel so promptly fell over and the incoming tide swamped the boat before it could be rescued. So things weren’t that bad in retrospect.
Calum changed the outboard engine for a smaller one and we were all set again in the outer harbour with water under us (although less coffee and biscuits) but had abandoned the Bell Rock goal and decided to go to the Isle of May – we got out of the harbour into the playful Forth and that was when we found that the sail wouldn’t go up. The engine was smaller so it was not going to be sensible to rely on it with no sail so we returned to the harbour that we were imprisoned in for hours to tie up and lie in the sun watching the tourists promenade. Well I lay in the sun whilst Calum tried to climb up the mast to get the sail up, me having flatly refused to squeeze into a bosuns chair and get stuck up a mast.
All in all a great experience, great fun messing about in boats even when they are high and dry and there was the nice fish and chips. And our wives didn’t even have to call out the coastguard, which wouldn’t have mattered as we were blocking the lifeboat ramp anyway.
