Lutine is a French lady fairy with the rather reassuring attribute of  ‘you penetrate the abysses of the sea without drowning’

It was also the name of the boat that we jumped ship to – it is a 60 foot wooden restored boat which used to be owned by Lloyds of London and had won the Fastnet race twice. It is a Camper & Nicholson built boat (1954) with lovely wide wooden decks and more sails than crew. Skippered by a man born for the sea (noting an Onedin Line lookalike with Captain Baines) our first meeting was turning up on his deck with all of our luggage and some french sticks and cheese for lunch. Gob smacked wasn’t the correct phrase as he shouts ‘What the hell are all these bags? Are you in transit?’ and ‘this is a big ship but I don’t know if we have enough room for these!’. We did offer to stow them in the marina offices but his son had already kindly cleared a bunk for us to temporarily bunk them in.

Hanging from the mizzen boom I was chatting to one of the professional looking crew who admitted he had been press ganged for the day too and had only come on board 5 minutes before our dressing down, that was before he had admitted to drinking urine by mistake on another voyage. A spoon playing Irishman,  a young cabin boy, another irish lad who was a Cornish graphic designer and a chap who used to live in the same street in Edinburgh as myself made up the crew complement for the race around  Île-de-Bréhat, off Paimpol.

We were locked out of the dock and followed the boats to the start line, then we wooshed around and almost crossed the start line to find out that in France that is the 10 minute warning poop on the horn so quickly came about and circled in readiness. There was no stopping this boat or crew – once the race was off we were well in the front of everyone with James navigating off charts below and everyone pulling sheets and changing sails – I managed to put away the Ensign (not flown during a race) and returned it at the end and was responsible for the Mizzen Sail. We even saw a dolphin off the bow.

‘I thought you said you were sailors’, gnarled the skipper to his new crew as he barked questions at his navigator. You go 240 degrees Dad he shouted back. It was great to see a professional crew all come together and everything happen (not seamlessly, but effectively and problems routed around quickly). With the large downwind sail out we flew and it was great seeing every other boat in the race so far behind. Sadly it was only once around the island as we were all getting into the feel of the boat – the race had finished we were first (handicapping meant we were third in the race – if we had gone around again we would have been first due to increasing distance all the time with the competitors) and we anchored off a lighthouse for rest and recreation as we couldnt lock in again at Pampoil until 7 in the evening.

The anchor didn’t feel right as we were moving so it was brought up and the anchor hook appeared with a tyre attached. Paddy hung over precariously and it was unceremoniously dumped into the water. We moved a bit further on and dropped anchor again. This time when we brought it up we had a lobster pot complete with lobster and spider crabs hanging off the hook. We also had the lobster fishing boat on our port side and had to swiftly get rid of this before they attacked us. We didn’t think anyone saw us but in the bar in the evening it appeared the entire race did and our anchoring was commented on. We were anchored outside a pub but couldn’t get there – this was some circle of hell. The weather was gorgeous so we all lay around sunbathing and chatting and dozing as sea kayakers paddled past, as the huge ferry boats offloaded tourists to the pub, as a dredging boat went past and the lobster fishermen returned laying out traps.

We had to take the passage back slowly as the tidal range is huge (9 metres) so moves fast and rises rapidly but Lutine’s draught was 9 feet so the depth gauge was nervously beeping. Locking in was with some Breton boat who almost decapitated a photographer in a rib in front of him, and we were all photographed by a lock side full of tourists as Breton dancing went on and pipes played. We disembarked with all of our luggage but with an invite to the race to Guernsey the next day which we gratefully accepted.

We all booked into a hotel at the marina side which in retrospect was a mistake thanks to the Breton festival that was on and the Europop band that played non stop until after 1am. But it was nice to get showered down and head out for some beer, snails and steak tartare, before retiring for some well earned sleep. An early start meant trips around the bakers and Marche for water, bread, cheese and batteries for my GPS.

Locked out and at the start we were raring to go only to find that the forecast force 4 to 5 winds decided to go on holiday elsewhere. There wasn’t a breath of wind so Clive the skipper said bugger this and started his engine and headed off. 5 minutes later the race was abandonded and everyone else followed Lutine on the long motor to Guernsey. We went the pretty route – near the rocks and lighthouses, and saw floating weed in abundance. My phone was more informative than the GOS – Welcome to Jersey it said and then Welcome to Guernsey. I was nodding off and retired downstairs onto a free bunk with my arm out as if demanding tariff for the heads. I awoke and we had reached Guernsey harbour, I strode on deck just to hear the boat come to a complete halt and a bit of a scrape on its bottom – we had scraped rocks in a buoyed channel into the harbour – the harbour rib came out and said that the tide was rising quickly so we would be off soonish – just to have the rest of the regatta fleet sail in wondering why we were stuck there.

We disembarked said our thanks and jumped into a rib taxi to the Jersey ferry which was sitting there. We raced up to the ticket office to be told she was dealing with a customer, who turned out to be disabled and so we had to wait as the ferry is sitting there. She came back – and we said jersey ferry and she looked at us as if we were stupid and said ‘We don’t deal with that here you need to go down there’ …. groan. We got to the booking office as the ferry was leaving the dock. Fay the friendly ferrygirl had us down as Mr Condor, which I think I shall use as my non-de-plume from now on, and got us tickets for tomorrows ferry (we would just make our flight) and she recommended a hotel that her boyfriend was sous chef at.

We dragged our bags until Gill found us a taxi and arrived at the hotel exhausted but still ready to negotiate room rates. A sous chef appeared at the desk and I asked if he was Fay’s boyfriend and he was astonished – we should have made out we were psychics. The room was comfortable and I went for a swim in the heated outdoor pool with some guy looking at me strangely – I am guessing it was my impressive array of bruises a consequence of hanging off backstays during propwash and the girls hitting me with a boathook to stop me snoring.

Dinner was as expected, what was unexpected was the food poisoning from the starter that Alison and I had – I must have been hit badly because I spent most of the night peppering the loo with explosive diahorrea and feeling sick (I imagined it was because I took my sea sickness wrist bands off and it was all catching up). I was speaking to the Maderia staff (all the hotel staff were from Madeira) who told me about their conditions – get pregnant get deported, and the way the island licences accommodation based on employment requirements, and there was some birthday party on with Essex girls and boys (’just cos your 16 doesn’t mean you can go off fucking in the bushes’, one ballroom clad lady hollered across the Guernsey night)

The next morning the taxi rushed us (the island has a speed limit of 35mph which makes buying from one of the islands Porsche and Asron Martin dealers a bit of a joke) to the ferry. I asked her if she was from Guernsey – yes I have lived here all my life she said proudly. There were accepting murmurs from the girls in the back. I then asked if she remembered the war – sharp intake of breath from the back, but she said she remembered it well. I then asked ‘which side were you on’ and a choking sound emerged from the back as in ‘why do we have to travel with this idiot?’ but the driver smiled and said ‘can’t you tell from my litle moustache’. She didn’t tell though, which was telling.

It was all plain sailing now or so we thought. The ferry would appear to have lost an engine, how careless of it. So it was going to be an hour late. That meant we had about 3 minutes to catch the plane at the other end if all went well…. being FlyBE we had to inform them 2 hours before hand of any changes. The only thing we could do was to change form Aberdeen to Edinburgh which was a later flight that day. Kim handled all the ticket rearrangements in her role of getting me home again.

The ferry people were very good in that they signed a thing saying the ferry was over an hour late and made sure we were at the front of the queue for getting off – we ran down the gangway picked up our bags and got into a taxi and straight into a traffic jam. We arrived to waht I assumed was Bombay Intgernational Airport – it certainly had the population to warrant it. God I hate the great unwashed British travelling public – flying used to be about style and elegance – now it is reminiscent of a bus station. Long queues which we strode to the front of to see if we could blag a seat on the aberdeen flight – the woman looked like we were insane, and we hadlt eve told her about our channel crossing, saying I was a pilot didn’t help either (I had forgotten that baggage handlers earn more than pilots in low cost airlines). We were on the Edinburgh flight so checked our bags into left luggage and took the pretty FlyBE customer care girls advice and walked across the staff car park and int the mermaid tavern for the rest of the day. It is often very difficult to stifle pub converstiaon but you could have cut the silence with a nife onc ehte girls got into their conversation about autoerotic asphyxiation and its prevalance in suicide cases.

There was almost a flight between an old glaswegian couple and someone who had the temerity to prebook and so could walk tothe front using his prebooked queue. Alison said – it is just as well the knives are in the hold baggage. The British abroad and we are not even properly abroad. The flight was uneventful, the porridge was yummy and I drained remaining euros on wine and gin. Stuart picked us off and we dropped the girls off at Inverkeithing where it appeared the line was closed and they had to get a bus with my waterproof jacket still in one of their bags….

I got back to find out that in my absence our gardner/fencer/chainsawer had been killed by a sheep  (not one of mine) and had been resurrected in the ambulance by a paramedic and defibrillator; the neighbouring farmer had rolled his tractor and had concussion and sadly a father and daughter had died in a dinghy accident on Keilder which put our own sailing adventures into a much dimmer light altogether.

We were all psyched up ready for the channel crossing – one of the busiest shipping channels in the world and we were going to head straight over it in a small flotilla of sailing boats – and not from the Dover/Calais side but from the Atlantic side crossing over 100 miles and into what looks like a sea defence set of rocks protecting Paimpol. The forecast was force 8 with rough seas so we wore our motion sickness bands (on the P6 acupuncture point which surprisingly seems to work) and gobbled down crystallised ginger only to find that the race had been postponed and we would find out tomorrow morning. So a day to spend passage planning going through the charts redoing tidal calculations and routes for what might be a daytime passage, whilst listening to the high winds whistling through the boats and the halyards clashing against the masts. When evening arrived we went on a small pub crawl to find out one crew hadn’t been told by their skipper that the 5am early rise had been cancelled too. They weren’t in our class so were not competitors but were still sceptical  – we did point out they would find out at 5am tomorrow whether we were telling the truth or not. We returned to the boat with me only getting my bottom wet as I almost fell out of the tender – things were going remarkably well.

Then they didn’t. At all.

The cooker broke down so we had no way of getting hot water, the heads inlet valve also decided to stop working, my lifejacket clamp fell off, our exit from the pontoon was met by a hail of abuse from a gnarly seaman who couldn’t believe the mess that two boats could make floating down the Dart towards his pride and joy,  and we had a wonderful kerfuffle at the start of the race in front of the committee boat again and last over the start line. And we were off following a large set of sails across the channel with the wind in the right direction and the tide shoving us eastward. Sixteen and a half hours passage – recalling why I fly to get places.

The waves were growing in size, Gill and I were chatting about music when she said ‘oh I hate Paul McCartney’, when a wave suddenly hit her and she cried out – ‘Christ, it’s a Paul McCartney fan all the way from the Mull of Kintyre’. As the waves grew it became harder to stand at the stern looking after the mainsheet so I slid into the helm seat with mainsheet in hand and what became a seat for the girls when they were helming (the helm stance was quite tiring in the standing position and the sitting position was too low so my Goldilocks solution seemed to work well – yes lapdancing across the channel).

The boat has a heavy and large keel so the waves were hitting it and causing it to go into a bizarre sliding motion akin to a skid which made helming tiring as every seventh wave shoved the entire boat off course. The chart plotter was difficult to read in the light of day but we had the sails in front to keep our interest as well as the rapidly approaching cargo ship.

The cargo ship appeared first as a box on the horizon, Alison took a bearing and we carried on exchanging anecdotes. The box grew in size and Alison took another bearing. This time the anecdotes stopped as she said we are on a collision course. With the box growing ever larger forming a clear image of a rapidly moving cargo ship and the bearings still confirming a collision (with which we were almost certainly going to lose out) there followed a heated debate on Collision Regulations (COLREGS) and Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) followed by a stream of abuse punctuated with ‘arrogant, incompetent and fuckwit’ which for once didn’t seem to be directed at me.

All hell broke loose at once, I was clipped on at the stern hanging onto the backstay, as the girls handled the sails and Charles whirled the wheel around and we were now parallel with the cargo ship and into its prop wash. ‘This is much better than Alton Towers’, I screamed, with an eye on the life raft as she heeled over. The boat righted itself and we watched the cargo ship wend its way wetward. Using AIS and my handheld GPS track I was able to work out which ship it was and have a photo of it on my desktop to remind me of our seaprox (along with an RAF tornado which our microlight had an airprox with) – recalling that Burt Bacharach song – why do cargo ships and fighter jets suddenly appear, everytime you are near..

The girls and I helmed our way south as Charles snoozed in readiness for the tough part of the route – the night route through the rocks of the North Passage. We watched the sun set and the red moon rise over the water as hour by hour passed in a cycle of helming and chatting and singing or humming our way through John Martyn’s repertoire. It was a full moon which gave a bit of light but there was little to follow on the horizon apart from the occasional sail appearing and disappearing with the waves. The eastbound channel ships, which were not on a collision course, passed to the front and behind us or straddled in a long line into the distance. The only lights were the moon and our navigation lights and the instrument lights (the chart plotter was moved into night mode).

Alison went to grab some sleep and after ten minutes I decided this would be a good chance with Charles on deck to grab an hour before the navigation nightmare starts with our waypoint Frog1. I discovered Alison in my bunk (it was a secure bunk so you don’t fall out) and the choice was a rear secure bunk which looked a bit to narrow, the forecabin which was bouncing up and down or one of the insecure bunks. Wedging myself into an insecure bunk I kind of drifted in and out of sleep – woken by MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY and PAN PAN PAN calls, until I was unwedged and cramping and moved over to the bunk under Alison. I managed to wake her up as I was thrown over onto the bunk and bounced off the wooden side of it. With one dubarry on and one off and a lifejacket on and off at the same time I managed to flatten her clothes and snore away for a short while before being launched onto the other side. I decided to go for the forecabin and was fast asleep until I thought we were sinking with a MIKE MIKE MIKE call.

It turned out that Gill needed some sleep and there were some navigaitonal points ahead that someone who had done the passage plan could help with. I now had to try to get my other dubarry boot on which was not wanting to – this was in the pitch dark on a rolling boat. Next the life jacket which turned out to be impossible due to a clamp coming off, and the next one I had problems with trying to get the clip closed – finally I was ready and realised I desperately needed to pee. So it was time to unlock the head door and throw myself in on the next roll and unlock it before I was thrown out again. That was when in the pitch dark I realised that my flaccid penis was somewhere under my lifejacket, waterproof jacket, waterproof trousers (with locking zips all going in different directions), my tight pair of Bear Grylls shorts and bamboo underwear. I also had to lift the seat cover, seat and try and pee in the right direction whilst being thrown about, before attempting to get the right seacocks open and closed and pumped. The PAN PAN PAN call turned out to be a women in a small boat with a broken rudder and she was being rescued by helicopter. At least we still had a working rudder.

I stayed in between the chart table and the deck. There were some issues. We had a passage plan that said if it was dark we choose at Frog 1 whether we have sufficient lights to go through the North Channel (which someone had mentioned over drinks was closed) or our first choice was in from the east down a well lit passage. However the chart plotter had been preset to the route and we were now sailing down the North Channel with rocks on all sides and with cardinal buoys all unlit and with lighthouses disappearing due to wave height making it almost impossible to count them for recognition. The chart plotter and GPS took this moment to die, of course.

I had my handheld GPS and I had the charts and started to make suggestions. The rocks and presence of sandbanks and steadily decreasing depth were of concern and I strongly suggested that we should go onto engine to make any progress as tacking with rocks yards away would not be good. Alison helmed bravely with a North West wind making life even more difficult. We started the engine which didn’t start. Great. Battery switched over and we were good to go. My GPS batteries, of course, chose this moment to go losing the backlighting of the screen so I had to use the chart table red light to roughly see where we were in relation to an invisible, in the dark, 193 degree transit. We were on it and motoring down, saw the white buoy we were looking for, and knew we were safe as morning broke and we saw other yachts at safe anchor.

We passed the finish line, retired due to using engine having crossed the channel and beaten by rocks and lack of lights in the last mile. If we had pressed on we could have been first in our class – yet again we could have also been sunk. We followed the well buoyed channel to the Paimpol locks, were locked in to the harbour and tied up on a pontoon and broke out he whisky. The girls announced their departure from the boat and I joined them in the abandoning ship as it wouldn’t have made any sense to rely on me as an incompetent crew and I figured Charles would press gang a complete crew off one of the boats that seemed to break rudders regularly. Three quarters of a bottle later of Highland Park and some fruit cake – the girls and I crowded into the forward bunks and snored our way through to lunch where we discovered Kir Breton (Kir and Breton cider), spinach crepes and mussels with chips.

Paimpol is a jolly town however it is a bugger to escape from. We went along to the tourist office to ask how to leave, an unusual request I grant it. The only way out was a 7 hour 3 change train journey in the opposite direction and ending up in St Malo where a ferry or flight could take us back to blighty. We were settled on an early morning departure leaving Charles to welcome his new crew and for us to start the long trip home. Charles had tickets for the evening so we all settled up our different accounts and polished off more Kir Breton and munched our way through the pheasant as I chatted to a crew from Guernsey. That was where one crew suggested that the skipper of the Lutine was press ganging as they needed more crew so we met the skipper and volunteered and in a moment of madness he agreed and took us on. We had to be on the boat at 0815.