Bobbing to the Baltic

Bobbing to the Baltic

Martin Edge

Copyright Martin Edge 2013

Published at Smashwords

First Edition

Published in Great Britain

Martin Edge asserts the right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

http://www.edge.me.uk

Bobbing to the Baltic

Zophiel’s Cruise in 2012 from The Forth to the Russian Border

Martin Edge

Continents

Preface

Waggling Wings

Denmark the Long Way

Ice Cream or Road Cone?

Designer Holes

Bloody Students

First Clogging

Models on Bikes

Tea Cup

Basket Case

Redundant Ditch

Tide, What Tide?

Bridge, What Bridge?

Old Copper Nose

Monster

Troll Hat

Gotta Get to Gøta

A Fantasy for Lunatics

Soda Shopping

Broken

Sölon Staff Association

Goldilocks to Uist

Lumparland

Popular in the Summer

Wester Hailes

The Prison Ships

A Peeling

No ‘U’ Turns

Bloody Subscriber Identity Module

A Side Order of Eastland

Better Out than In

The Phone was in the Oven

Terrible Tidal Tales

Into the Yachts’ Graveyard

Self-Scrambling Eggs

Heroically Unsticking a German

Grungy Black Punk Dreadlocked Hippy Fascists

Goulash Archipelago

The Last Rock of the Year

Assimilation into the Hive of the Borg

Welsh Sweden

Hippyocrisy

Joy Spring

Twinned with Hull

Mingunauld

Fan

Lemming

Preface

Bobbing to the Baltic is the tale of Zophiel’s cruise in the summer of 2012. ‘Zophiel’ is a Vancouver 27 – a wee, twenty seven foot, long-keeled, cutter rigged, fibreglass sloop. She’s about thirty years old but designed more like the solid, slow, dependable, seaworthy craft of an earlier generation. In 2012 she travelled from the Forth Estuary to the Russian border with Finland then back, through the million rocky islands of the north shore of the Baltic – with a side order of Estonia – as far as Holland. The whole rambling shebang is published for various e-readers.

In 2003 Griff Rhys Jones published a book giving an account of a trip to the Baltic with the title To the Baltic with Bob – An Epic Misadventure. ‘Bobbing to the Baltic’ is the story of a trip along a very similar route in a much smaller boat. It is better in four important respects. Firstly there’s more pictures. Secondly I actually enjoyed the trip, for the most part. Griff Rhys Jones paints an altogether more gloomy and miserable picture of the Baltic. I hope I make it sound more like what it is – an idyllic summer cruising ground of infinite appeal. Thirdly, my book is cheaper. Fourthly, I need the money much more than Griff Rhys Jones does. After all, someone’s got to pay for me to swan around sailing all summer.

On the other hand I make absolutely no claims as to literary merit or ‘epicness’. It’s just a wee story about an extended holiday. It joins three previous accounts of trips around the North Sea, to Arctic Norway and around Ireland, each of which has also been published for e-readers.

Waggling Wings

Ooo look, an aeroplane! said Simon. Yeah, very interesting I replied a little testily. Since we were about ten miles from the Dutch coast and probably underneath the flight path from god knows where to Schiphol airport this scarcely seemed remarkable. Anyway I was more concerned with vessels at sea level than up in the sky. We were in the middle of negotiating the spaghetti junction of traffic separation schemes that litters the coast off the Dutch Frisian Islands and our AIS had packed up. Nearly all the goods coming into and out of Northern Europe pass along these shipping lanes and we were trying to cross them all in a twenty seven foot yacht. Visibility was fine and we didn’t really need the AIS, but it was nevertheless annoying that Sod’s Law had chosen that moment for our handy bit of ship-dodging kit to pack up. Anyway, AIS is becoming such a standard piece of kit for shipping that you can feel a bit bereft without it. Because of it you hardly hear any shipping on the VHF any more. For example we’d heard nothing at all on channel sixteen since leaving the Forth three days before.

He’s flying very low. And he’s circling round again. Uh huh. I dismissed him and continued trying to trace a break in the aerial cable that meant that the AIS could only detect ships less than ten yards away, when it was getting a bit late to take avoiding action. The choppy, grey following sea blown by a north-easterly onto a shallowing lee shore wasn’t making the task, or anything on board, any easier.

Ooo look, he’s flying round again, even lower this time. I think he’s trying to attract our attention. Come and look. This was getting annoying. I had developed a deep antipathy to leaving the saloon when it wasn’t my watch. Ever since leaving our home berth at Port Edgar Marina, under the Forth Bridges, on the evening of May the first it had been bleeding freezing. Twelve hours of battering to windward heading for northern Denmark against a freezing easterly force five and a three metre chop had effectively soaked the three of us and everything on board with North Sea. Said sea, which Zoph’s handy hull thermometer recorded at six degrees Celsius, continued to spray us with its icy shards of near frozen water on every wave. I was also acutely aware that arriving in the middle of Holland after aiming for northern Denmark was pretty poor navigation even by my standards.

The only thing that was making life bearable was the charcoal burning stove. This primitive, top loading steel drum had been stuffed to the brim with glowing charcoal since we passed under the Forth bridges and was managing to prevent the cabin from turning into a soaking fridge. Instead it kept it stable, with the temperature and humidity of a damp shed in winter.

Yes, he’s definitely trying to attract our attention. I steeled myself against the icy spray and climbed into the cockpit. This was ridiculous, why the hell would an aeroplane want to attract our attention? There were hundreds of huge ships out there and doubtless dozens of airliners zapping through the sky above the low damp clouds. Why would a wee twenty seven foot boat attract anybody’s attention?

Here he comes again. I had to admit he had a point. A twin engined prop-driven plane circled around us only a couple of hundred feet up. Suddenly it banked and headed straight towards us in a low dive. Headlights came on then flashed repeatedly and insistently at us. As it closed on us its wings started to waggle violently up and down. For a moment I had the surreal impression that we had wandered through a wormhole in the space-time continuum somewhere around the Dogger Bank and reappeared in the early 1940s. We were being attacked by a dive-bombing Stuka. Or perhaps The Netherlands had declared war on Britain and that’s why there had been a radio silence. Something to do with the value of the Euro perhaps?

But he pulled up before hitting us and mercifully didn’t machine gun us. He did however circle around and repeat the whole headlight flashing, wing waggling performance. Yes, he’s definitely trying to attract our attention said Gordon, Why not try and get him on the VHF?. Well he’s not contacted us on the radio. Anyway, do planes use Channel 16?. Coastguard ones do and I imagine that’s what he is replied Gordon.

Fair enough I said and steeled myself for the frightening process of making official communications on the VHF. Now Zoph’s radio is an ancient affair. None of your new fangled DSC facilities with automatic distress calls. This is a three knob job. One for the channel, one for volume and one called ‘squelch’, whatever that is. There’s a speaker down below and another, nicked from a car stereo, sellotaped inside a Tesco ice cream tub in the cockpit. Very professional. The ‘hand set’ is simply an old fashioned black telephone handle, with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. The sort that used to sit on telephones that had a proper round dial on the front. A hole has been cut in the middle of this handle into which the ‘transmit’ button has been set. Soon before leaving home I had made a highly sophisticated improvement to this handset, which consisted of a couple of makeshift clips to hold it to the wall above the radio. I was pleased with my handiwork, as it stopped the handset from crashing about the cabin on its curly wire in a big sea. As I reached for the handle I realised that my improvement also had a small side effect. One of the clips holding it to the wall had, in the commotion of the three day passage, got jammed on the ‘transmit’ button.

For somewhere between twelve hours and three days – and certainly whilst we crossed all of northern Europe’s busiest shipping lanes – we had been broadcasting to the world on the emergency channel. As the coastguard tried to broadcast strong wind warnings and anxious fishermen huddled round their radios, all they would hear was Gordon snoring or Simon saying how bloody cold it was. For days, as supertankers picked their way through the channels on passage from Germany to China, they would reach for the radio to call up other ships on converging courses and all they would hear was me moaning about the drip down the back of my neck, or swearing at crockery as it flew about the cabin.

I’ve occasionally heard of these cases in the past. What sort of arse, I would think would be stupid enough to broadcast Radio One on an emergency channel for hours? How dim witted would you have to be not to notice, apart from anything else, that you never heard anyone else on channel sixteen?. Now I knew exactly what sort of arse would do such a thing. Me. I made my apology to the Dutch Coastguard plane as grovellingly abject as was consistent with conventions for the use of VHF. But even though the chap on the radio was Dutch and therefore theoretically extremely laid back, he couldn’t disguise the fact that he was fairly pissed off to be called out and have to fly about for hours trying to attract the attention of frigging idiots floating about in a plastic bucket.

Thus was my fairly inauspicious introduction to continental Europe at the start of Zophiel’s 2012 cruise to the far end of the Baltic.

Denmark the Long Way

It was Ireland that made me decide to go to the Baltic. In 2011 I took Zophiel round Ireland anticlockwise and it was an interesting and mostly enjoyable cruise but – and they’re quite big buts (or as the Americans would say ‘big arses’) – for the sea and the weather. On the west of Ireland there was a constant swell from the Atlantic that meant there were virtually no conditions of wind and sea in which you could actually sail. In the Irish Sea it’s the moon driven, six hourly swell that causes problems. The tide seemed always to be against me and the huge rise and fall on its east side makes for inhospitable lee shore coasts with nowhere to go and a twelve metre tidal range. Coupled to this the constant depressions sweeping through every few days all summer meant that you had pleasant enough conditions for about one day in three. When I got decent weather I would take advantage of it by doing long passages that bypassed most of the good bits. The rest of the time I either battered into pissing rain and big swells or cowered in poor shelter in deserted harbours.

As I cowered I dreamed of other seas. I created a fantasy land in which there were no tides, no long fetches onto lee shores, no dangerous shallows and thousands of perfect island anchorages where Zoph could sit for free in perfect shelter. In my fantasy land there would be no Atlantic depressions bringing gales, but instead gentle summer breezes, reliable sunshine and warm summer seas in which we could float about at will. In short, I dreamed about a place where sailing was a pleasant leisure pursuit as opposed to a life-threatening and uncomfortable outward-bound challenge.

At home in the autumn I realised that my fantasy land actually existed. It had a name and was called ‘The Baltic’. There, nobody has heard of passage planning. People just go for a sail in the sun without kitting themselves out in seventeen layers of fleeces and dry suits. There, they don’t put on their serious faces and give full safety briefings to all crew before pottering out for a sail for an hour or two. Instead they leave all their footwear in the car, install their sprogs on the pulpit to get the most out of the cooling breeze, slap on some suntan cream and wander off under sail to a deserted island for a summer barbeque. By all accounts the Scottish use of the word ‘baltic’ simply to mean ‘bloody freezing’ is in fact a massive irony. I wanted to head to the Baltic for a taste of their ultra-reliable summer weather – thirty degrees Celsius every day and sea the temperature of bath water.

Plan ‘A’ was to head straight from Zoph’s berth at Port Edgar to the sheltered waters of the Limfjord in northern Denmark. This sandy fjord has a shallow entrance which can be dodgy in onshore winds, but then provides a virtually riverine route through Denmark to the Skagerrak. Unfortunately there’s the little matter of the North Sea between us and Scandinavia. This is, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, far from being a calm and balmy duck pond and it’s almost four hundred miles in a straight line from Port Ed to the entrance to the Limfjord. Though I’m happy to sail single-handed most of the time I really don’t have the constitution or the temperament for a three day solo crossing of the North Sea, even in its most benign mood. Apart from anything else I am far too much of a fan of sleep to be satisfied with dozing in the cockpit and being woken by an egg timer to take a look around every ten minutes or so. At least three days of plodding across a cold North Sea in a weakened and semi-comatose state until I finally fetched up on a Danish sandbank did not appeal, so I set about looking for a crew.

Here is an odd fact about sailing in Britain. There are people who don’t just laugh in your face when you offer them the tempting opportunity to be thrown around until their stomachs churn and be soaked to the skin by freezing salt water in a small plastic bucket. I sent out a few well directed emails and found two volunteers. I had been hoping for experienced, capable crew, but, as the Chegwin family have found to their cost, cheggers can’t be boozers.

Gordon Campion had sailed his Moody 38, ‘Equinox’, from Edinburgh, round Spitsbergen, up to eighty degrees north and back. But he’d only done it once. Granted he’d also completely circumnavigated the globe in Equinox, Crossing the Pacific and returning via Pirate Alley off the coast of Somalia, but as I say I had hoped for a little more experience. The last time Simon Harrison crossed the North Sea, from the Elbe to the Forth, on that occasion aboard a Sadler 32, the mast fell down about fifty miles off Denmark. This didn’t seem to phase him particularly and he was keen to have a go at a similar crossing in a smaller boat. I subsequently realised it was probably Simon’s fault that the Sadler’s mast fell off. He had the slightly disturbing and dangerous habit of tempting fate beyond endurance by saying stuff like ‘Nothing can possibly go wrong now…’ out loud. Aboard Zoph he would say such things without even touching wood and even whistled loudly at times when we already had plenty of wind. The RYA should mount a campaign against that sort of irresponsible behaviour.

So that was the crew. Both were available for the first week or so of May and both were practical engineers who could happily do things like strip engines down and put them back together at sea. The boat was as prepared as she was going to be. Most things were in reasonable working order, we had a full stock of scran, about 200 litres of diesel, 200 litres of water and 600 cans of beer aboard. This still left what I judged to be just about enough freeboard. The waterline was only a few inches above the level of the self-filling cockpit. All we needed now was a half decent forecast.

Annoyingly the North Sea is presided over by the Norse gods, who designed it to suit Vikings on raping and pillaging raids. So they gave it nice easterly winds all through the spring and early summer to blow the Vikings over to Britain. Later in the summer and in the autumn, once they had finished with the pillaging and so forth, Odin et al. obligingly provided nice westerlies to blow them back again. Though the Norsemen haven’t done a lot of pillaging for a while now, the climate is still arranged in their favour, which is a pain in the arse for anyone wanting to head east in the spring and west in the autumn. It’s a particular pain in the arse when, while you’re waiting for your unlikely weather window, the headlines are confidently predicting ‘The Coldest May for a Hundred Years’. I sat through the latter part of April watching the constant easterlies sweeping across the North Sea, blowing directly from the Limfjord to the Forth.

Only one circumstance led to anything other than easterlies all the way across the North Sea. That circumstance simply demonstrated that Thor and all his mates were just taking the piss. Sometimes the air flow turned a little to the north, giving north easterlies over the southern and western part of the North Sea and, ironically, north westerlies blowing straight into the Limfjord. All the pilot information on the entrance to this fjord is consistent. Whilst it’s sheltered once you’re in, you shouldn’t attempt to enter it with anything over fifteen knots blowing from the north west. If we’d have headed there from Port Ed, by the time we were trying to cross the shallow bar into the fjord it would, according to xcweather.co.uk, have been blowing thirty five knots from the north west, gusting to over fifty knots. With a fetch of about 850 miles from Iceland pushing eight metre seas onto a three metre bar this would have been pretty much literal suicide, even if we could plug away on a beat for four hundred miles to get there. As May loomed closer it began to look increasingly like I wasn’t going to get to Scandinavia before my selfish, inconsiderate crew were no longer available because they had, so they claimed, ‘their own lives to lead’.

Faced with the prospect of remaining pinned to the east coast for months, my slow brain began to hatch another plan for getting to Scandinavia, based on the Gordon McEquinox school of weather forecasting. I had sailed with Gordon before – in northern Norway, across the Atlantic and, most recently, across Biscay, I knew he had a somewhat pedantic approach to passage planning. Before heading anywhere Gordon downloads the most detailed, location-specific ‘GRIB’ files he can find for as far into the future as can reasonably be predicted without recourse to a medium. He then plans the passage in great detail and with massive certainty and states confidently exactly what the wind and sea will be doing every hour, for every mile of the route, for the next week. Four days into a passage Gordon whips out his GRIBs and pronounces that at three p.m. today, Tuesday, within a ten mile radius of this bit of the ocean, it should be blowing from the west north west at 15.3 knots, rising to 17.8 knots by half past four. If the anemometer says it’s blowing from the west north west at 17.5 knots at three fifteen, there’s either something wrong with the anemometer or a stiff letter of complaint to the Met Office is called for, since they’ve got the five day forecast wrong by over half an hour.

The astonishing thing is how well this approach seems to work, at least when you are properly offshore. With increasingly good forecast information available you no longer always have to look at the shipping forecast and say Force seven in Forties and Dogger, so let’s stay in port. Rather you have to ask "exactly when and exactly where will there be a force seven in Forties and Dogger. This year the first few days in May promised an easterly force four or five, going north easterly or northerly and up to force six or seven. But the strongest stuff was due to start near the Danish coast at round about the latitude of Edinburgh. Further south it was due to go round to the north and reach no more than twenty, or perhaps twenty five knots for a few days. This should be a good breeze to propel us south east down the bleak, shelterless coast of England, then across to Holland. If we spent thirty six hours or so tracking down the coast, we could get an updated forecast and decide whether to nip into somewhere grotesque like Hull, or turn further east to the Netherlands. A strong north easterly would, on the other hand, not give us a lot of options for nipping into ports along the shallow east coast.

I persuaded the crew that a trip to the Netherlands was preferable to a visit to Denmark and that the ironically named ‘Easyjet’ from Amsterdam was, if anything, a step up from Ryan Air from a field a hundred miles from Copenhagen. We agreed on a departure from Port Ed on the evening of May the first. This would mean battering against a bit of an easterly out of the Forth, but should get us to somewhere in Holland before any serious deterioration in the weather. The night before we left there was a near mutiny on the part of Gordon, who seemed to think that a family dinner and piss-up was preferable to battering through the night down a freezing estuary and that we could wait until the following morning. Having steeled myself for the trip I was reluctant to see the weather window slipping away and successfully shamed him into the evening departure.

So we waited on the fuel berth at Port Ed for my other half, Anna, and various hangers-on to turn up and send us on our way. At seven p.m. on May the first we slipped the lines, motored out into the Forth, raised a double-reefed main and battered under motor through the bridges. Two Hunter 707s belonging to Port Edgar Yacht Club were mucking about, sailing around the cans off South Queensferry with a couple of deep reefs in. I little realised how significant this sighting was and that I wouldn’t see another British based boat of any sort until I arrived in Helsinki, sixty days and over sixteen hundred miles later.

Ice Cream or Road Cone?

I nervously wondered, as we pushed along due east at two and a half knots against the steep, easterly chop, whether Gordon might have had a point about waiting until the morning. But as we passed the small, sheltering Island of Inchmickery and bore away to motorsail on starboard tack, Zoph speeded up a little and we began to make a bit more respectable progress. Whatever the forecasts said about north easterlies, there was no way the wind was deviating at all from a straight east-west line as it blew up the Firth of Forth. At twenty degrees off the wind we weren’t battering so directly against the waves, but even so, each steep two metre hill dumped a good few gallons of near-freezing brown estuary on us. The ancient top-loading charcoal stove enjoyed the stiff twenty five knot apparent breeze though and roared away. I had often wondered what sort of idiot would design a top loading fire, as the boat filled with thick smoke and black charcoal dust. But this time I didn’t care. It was providing some much needed warmth and dryth, without which we would have become thoroughly miserable. Or rather, even more thoroughly miserable.

The crew were grateful enough for the warmth not to ask the usual incredulous questions about how you can have a solid fuel fire on a plastic boat. This question is usually asked by people with open fires in houses constructed primarily of wood. There was steak and tatties, precariously balanced on knees, for dinner, as Zoph bucked up and down on the short sea. A change to port tack as we passed Inchkeith island, then we settled down into a two hour watch system and Zoph plodded through the night at between three and four knots. I didn’t do a great deal of tacking on this cruise. That shift to port tack lasted something over a week.

The fact that we were on port tack all the way turned out to be a happy accident. Zoph has only three berths – port and starboard saloon berths and a starboard pilot berth. Though the saloon berths have reasonable lee cloths it would have been extremely uncomfortable trying to kip on a port berth as your arse was constantly thrown sideways onto a straining lee cloth. Both starboard berths provided secure wedging spaces in which to jam yourself against the largest of the waves. There was the slight problem that each crashing wave sent a thin dribble of water under the sprayhood, across the main hatch and straight down your neck as you lay wedged into the pilot berth. But that was a minor inconvenience which it would have been churlish to complain about.

I was still nervous about whether I’d made the right decision in leaving when we did. I really didn’t want to have to batter against wind and sea all the way to Holland. But when I went back on watch at six a.m. the motion was easier as the wind backed slightly to the north and we turned slightly to the south. In another hour we were on a fine reach. The jib and staysail went up, the engine was turned off and Zoph ploughed south east at over five knots.

As forecast the wind slowly increased during the day, but it backed a little further and we turned a little further south so that we bowled along reasonably comfortably in the three metre swell. It was still a fairly fine reach and the operation of cooking food or making coffee involved bearing away onto a near run so that the chef could put stuff in cups or bowls, as opposed to plastering the ceiling with it. For the purpose of changing course downwind I had rigged a permanent gybe preventer for the boom. This arrangement stays rigged most of the time when Zoph is cruising. Not only does it prevent people getting their heads stove in by gybes, but it stops the annoying effect of the boom thrashing about in a sloppy sea.

All changes in course on this passages were carried out by means of a few twiddles of Leo’s knob. Leo was the fourth member of crew on board, the wind vane steering. His is the name that the human helm cries out when coming about. Having steered across the Atlantic on Gordon’s boat ‘Equinox’ solely by means of her ‘Hydrovane’ wind vane steering, I