Across the North Sea

So at 6am on Sunday we headed out to sea. What can I say? It was a very boring and not very comfortable passage. The forecast was west to northwest winds, but there was no north in the wind at all (although the waves were coming from the NW), and as our course was pretty much due east, we were in constant danger of gybing. So for reasons of safety and comfort for Sam and Anne, we did the whole thing under jib and engine, which was not what I expected.

Initially of course we were in the lee of the English coast, which at least gave us some time to get used to being at sea. After that, on the Kalessin bumpiness scale, it probably rated third after Delfzijl to Cuxhaven in 2011, which was a beam reach, and SYH to Oostende in 2015 which was a close reach. The new tiller pilot did a sterling job on this most difficult point of sailing. I can't say that any of the crew really had a very good time, although thank goodness the sun shone for most of the passage and it was pretty warm.

Once we got offshore we established what I had already feared, that the range of the fixed VHF was much shorter than it should be and we heard almost no radio traffic. AIS, which uses the same aerial, was showing vessels only up to about two miles away. So I suspect there is damage to the aerial cable somewhere between head height and the masthead. Thank god for the relatively new and robust iCOM handheld VHF, but it only works over a range of 1-2 miles. Fortunately the North Sea is full of ships, windfarms, oil and gas rigs etc so if something had gone wrong hopefully someone would have heard us.

At about 5pm an enormous black cloud could be seen looming up behind us with a great deal of rain attached to the bottom. Ben and I dressed in our waterproofs to greet it and reefed the jib. According to the wind instrument we saw a maximum apparent wind of 25kt which would equate to at least 30kt true. Apart from that mostly we saw 6-10kt apparent and our speeds were between 4.5 and 6kt. And we did get a very nice rainbow at the end of it.

The worst bit was after dark (around 8pm) when we were tired and just wanted to arrive. Our route took us along the edge of an anchorage where we kept having to dodge huge tankers in the dark. We couldn't go further south because there is a windfarm in the way (Luchterduinen) and we were just south of the main IJmuiden channel. I went below to rest but every time I dozed off Sam woke me because he needed something, which did nothing for my temper. Fortunately around 11pm Ben (who slept a fair bit during the day) took charge, sent me below properly and I slept for a bit while he hand steered to dodge the last of the tankers. We tied up on the reception pontoon at Seaport Marina IJmuiden just after 1am (BST) and it wasn't until we turned into the wind to moor up that I realised how strong it had been all along.

Ben being masterful in Sam's cavernous oilies