Sand Point and back

Overslept the alarm by a shade, so skipped my ritual morning cuppa to make the time up getting out of the house Sunday morning. Dad and I still got to the boat in plenty of time to make the last lock at 1030, so compensated by grabbing a bacon and mushroom roll each from the cafe van outside the marina office once we got there.

Consensus of conversation in the queue as we stood waiting for the bacon to fry said it was a day for motoring, not sailing. The sky was grey and overcast, the air dull and flat but not cold. The flags hung outside the marina office ruffled slightly in the light wind, but hung was the operative word.

We had the lock out to ourselves. The tide now fast on the ebb, the mud-banks enclosing the Portishead Hole loomed large as we picked our way out to the channel.

Any life in the easterly wind was subdued by the swift flow of the tide running with it. Nonetheless, clear of the shore, we hauled up the sails and stilled the engine anyway. At first we drifted at the mercy of the whirls, spins and eddies of the tide. Pushing the boom out didn't help much, although I rigged the preventer to stop the weight of the boom swinging back and collapsing the mainsail. However, once I'd polled the genoa out to a goose-wing with our new whisker pole, the boat's yawing stabilised and she started to edge away on a gentle run, the speed occasionally touching a knot, with the flow of the tide adding up to a very healthy 6 knots over the ground and in the direction we wanted to go.

The peace and quiet were sublime, the sea almost mirror smooth, the boat directionally stable with the goosed sails. Despite the 6 knots, any sense of movement almost felt like an illusion, imperceptible other than in the gradual shift of the south-easterly shore slipping by. A perfect morning and antidote to the late night before; even Dad seemed to relax into the mood of it, and didn't fret once about putting the engine on because of any apparent lack of wind. We had nowhere in particular to go, and no need to get there anytime soon

Visibility was a murky affair, the muddy grey sky hardly distinguishable from the esturine-silted sea. A dark patch out off our starboard beam seemed flat enough to be mistaken for the tell tail ripples of a gust, but was in fact the looming sand-banks of Bedwin Sands and Welsh Grounds. A handful of small boats lay at anchor along the bank, anglers fishing for autumn cod; we were the only sail abroad on the smoothed waters though.

With so little apparent wind behind us, there was no chill in the air at all. Clevedon town ghosted past us to port, the rush of water surging around the Welsh Hook cardinal coming up on us surprisingly quickly for all of our apparent stillness, and then receding again into silence as we slid down channel with the tide, out and on past Langford Grounds beyond. Leaving the gloaming sands and shoals of Langford to port as the tide began to ease, we dropped the pole and hardened up onto a starboard reach, heading in towards Sand Point.

Around 1300, a mile shy of Sand Point, Swallow Rocks clearly visible as too the pier of Birnbeck Island marking the far side of Sand Bay, the tide finally turned against us. We gybed onto port, heading cross-ways to the tide out towards Tail Patch for a while, before hardening up and beginning the beat home. Little pinches of afternoon sun were beginning to creep through the thick murk hanging overhead, but were never quite realised in their potential.

With the slight wind now over an albeit relatively modest spring tide, the apparent wind was enough to let our little boat kick her heels up on the beat, under full sail heeling over on occasion to as much as 20 degrees, just shy of which seems to be her sweet spot, and touching just short of 4 knots through the water at times. The satisfaction of 4 knots really is a relative thing; it was a lovely juxtaposition to the gentle drift of the morning and made for a fine afternoon's sailing, beating all the way home back up the Bristol Deep and King Road, dropping the sail off Portishead and entering the shelter of the Hole, just missing the first lock of the tide back in at 1545 so giving ourselves a forty minute wait at anchor with a cup of tea for the next one.

Overall, a little short of 6 hours sailing and somewhere shy of 30 miles covered over the course of the day's trip. We shared the lock back in with five other boats, the GMT sun just dropping out of the sky as we pulled in alongside our berth.