Spring tides and a gig Saturday night were always going to limit our sailing options for the weekend if we were going to take Calstar out. And we wanted to, very much. Between band commitments and the weather, we've only managed to get her out once so far this year, despite it now being March. But a Saturday night gig put Saturday out of reach, and spring tides in these parts dictate high water will be early and late in the day, so the only daylight sailing will be down channel and back.
Sunday's initially grim forecast moderated as the week preceding wore on, so by Saturday night we'd secured a promise that although the sky would be grey and visibility potentially murky, the rain would cease with daylight and hold off till evening and the character of the day would be a steady westerly F3, only veering to the north west and blowing up to a 4 gusting 6 later. High water Portishead was a 12.8m at 0706.
Wanting to be back in before the heavier weather joined us, and expecting a late night Saturday, we took the last lock of the tide out Sunday morning, sharing it with a single charter fishing boat in the lock ahead of us, departing Portishead at 1030. With less of the ebb tide remaining, my hope was to not get flushed too far down channel before the tide turned and we could head back. The first lock back in on the next tide would be 1615; it would be nice to be back for that.
The mud banks of the Hole were tall and gloomy as we motored out between them and the overbearing pier wall and into the channel beyond. Beyond the shelter of the wall the tide was running hard, the silted waters swirling and chopped against a fresh breeze. Turning into wind, I raised the main with a first reef in, stilled the engine and unfurled the headsail, but left a couple of rolls in it. The drone of the engine silenced, the little yacht lent over on a port tack and set out on a lively close-winded trot out towards Clevedon.
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| photo: roger gribble |
We tacked under the cliffs of Ladye Bay, just above Clevedon, to ensure we had enough height to clear the sandbanks of the Flats and headed west along the Bristol Deep, the previously fresh breeze now beginning to distinctly slacken off. As we passed the Clevedon North Cardinal to starboard, the fading wind began to head us significantly, veering about 30 degrees, pushing us up towards the sandbanks of Middle Ground. I dropped the rolls out of the headsail in the lightening conditions, but left the first reef in the main; heavier weather was still expected, and we were in no rush to do much more than simply follow the tide.
In the last hour or so of the now easing ebb, we tacked, turning away from the looming sandbanks of the broad expanse of the exposed Middle Grounds, and then bore away to a broad reach, the listless air barely filling the sails to provide steerage, but the last of the ebb still carrying us along at a knot or two towards Sand Point.
We've allowed provisions on the boat to run low over the winter. Our habit of sailing from pub to pub meant that many of the cans of food we'd stored aboard contingent against the possibility of starvation had actually started to go out of date through lack of turnover, so Dad has been clearing them out and not necessarily replacing them. Lunch therefore was a relatively humble affair of coffee and Jaffa Cakes.
About a mile and a half off Sand Point, our sails set loose for the reach suddenly collapsed and started to flog noisily. The wind had filled back in, unexpectedly backing back around to the south again rather than veering further as forecast. At bottom of tide, or as good as, we gybed the boat then set her on a run back up-channel. With the wind directly astern, I rigged a preventer up to the boom and poled the headsail out to windward to goose-wing the sails, and set a course that would take us just outside the now clearly visible outer sandbanks of Langford Grounds. Calstar trotted along before the refreshed wind at a couple of knots over ground against the tide, quite happy on her run. I left the first reef in the main, conscious the sky was darkening with rain both behind us towards the Cardiff shore and ahead, abeam of our port bow in the direction of Newport.
It was looking increasingly likely we were going to catch something, but for the moment though we enjoyed our own little bit of personal spring weather between the two patches of murk, the lack of much apparent wind due to our running ahead of it making life in the cockpit if not exactly balmy, quite comfortable.
Clearing the western most stretches of sandbank, we turned onto a north easterly course along the exposed Clevedon Flats, gybing the boom across and resetting the poled out headsail to starboard. Retrieving and resetting the whisper pole was straight forward enough, but I momentarily stymied myself when I re-rigged the gybed over preventer over the top of the jib-sheet. In the light conditions and slight sea, rather than re-rigging the preventer and disturbing the now nicely drawing mainsail, sea it was quicker and easier to partially furl the headsail and leave it blanketed by the main, unthread the jib sheet and re-thread it back through the fairlead right side of the preventer before trying to goose the headsail again.
Dad mocked me mercilessly, "Cost us five minutes, that did!"
A gross exaggeration. A couple of minutes, tops.
The sky blackened ominously behind us as we re-entered the Bristol Deep and the tidal race that so often forms off of Clevedon. The pressure astern picked up, little whitecaps now appearing atop the wavelets of the wind-flattened tide, but other than the merest hint of rain it came to no more than that, the gloaming blowing astern of us and into and over land as we sailed clear, the sky now back towards the Cardiff shore brightening with its passing, the wind settling back down again to its previous sedate pace of about 10 knots, most of that absorbed by the now fresh running flood tide.
And that was the picture for the hour that followed, a gentle, drama free run downwind with the tide that took us all the way back to Battery Point off Portishead, where I doused the headsail, started up the engine and Dad put her head to wind as I dropped the main. We turned in behind the pier wall, ferry-gliding in with the tide at about 1540, about five hours after we'd left earlier that day and a shade over 25 miles later.
The tide was still very low, with little water in the Hole on our arrival. We parked the boat, and yes, I choose my words with care, in the fairway leading up to the lock, until the tide lifted us again about ten minutes later, after which we idled in the shallows careful not to get caught again, waiting for the lock to reopen at 1615. A very short while later, as we finally pulled into our berth, the heavens opened and it began to rain.
It was one of those days, with nowhere in particular to go, and no particular reason to go there. But we went anyway, and as always, I'm glad that we did. It's one of the advantages of keeping the boat nearby in Portishead.
And Portishead is a lovely spot to keep a boat, if you disregard the slightly restricted access and the potential pitfalls you take as a matter of course when you can get up to 14 meters of tide on a bad day. But the marina is fantastic, the facilities great, the nearby restaurants plentiful and good, and it's singularly convenient for us, being only about 40 minutes down the road from home.
We spent a good part of last summer based in Swansea, but despite the admittedly lovely blue water, the dolphins and porpoises and the much kinder tides (relatively speaking; I have been told my perspective on these things is somewhat damaged) we found ourselves just as constrained in our options by the location's remoteness from anywhere else, and the restricted operating hours of the locks. Add to that the additional travel time to get to the boat, and it seriously bit into our sailing time last year.
In the end, I was glad to bring her home to Portishead again.
But we're seriously thinking of moving the boat over to Penarth Marina in Cardiff Bay.
It would add an extra half an hour to the car journey each way. But we're still only talking an hour and twenty minutes. And Cardiff is much, much less tidally restricted; you have the wide, freshwater expanse of Cardiff Bay sheltered behind the Barrage, and the Barrage locks are available 24 hours on all but the bottom of spring tides if you want to get out into the Bristol Channel. The tide in the Channel is, admittedly, still significant, but, within the shelter of the Cardiff and Penarth Roads not as brutally significant as it is in the King Road off Portishead.
That alone massively opens up the sailing options available. That, and based in Cardiff we'd essentially be a day further down-channel and therefore a day closer to blue water.
So we are thinking of it. On the other hand, Portishead is terribly convenient, and Dad is ever so fond of the place. He only works three days a week to my five, so on his days off he's as likely as not to be found down in the marina, muddling about aboard the boat without me. Penarth would be a bit of a further stretch to go to do that. On the other hand, safe from the ravages of the tide behind the Barrage, he could probably manage Calstar in and out of the marina single-handed, so he'd have the whole bay to potter about in. Whilst he is fond of Portishead Marina, he is just as fond of the fleshpots of Cardiff's Mermaid Quay.
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