Travelling South
Trip Start
May 06, 2008
1
103
130
Trip End
Sep 30, 2008
Wells-next-the-Sea,
England,
United Kingdom
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Now when you have 72 miles to cover and you average 5 knots, simple maths says that it will take 15 hours or so to get to your destination. A tidal cycle is 12 hours roughly, so that in 15 hours you will have either an extra 3 hours of positive current or 3 additional hours of current against you. We wanted positive currents at Flamborough Head, which was some 30 miles down the coast, so leaving at 05:30 was about right, in theory, we would get the start of the positive tide that would take us the majority of the way to Spurn Head, which is at the mouth of the Humber
9 of the 900 flies
. There, there is a long curved spit that bends to the west and just inside the curve is an anchorage, our destination.The journey down to Flamborough is one of those episodes best forgotten. The SE wind and current were against us, so progress was slow, molluscan slow. We knew it would be but I was hoping that the sea would be relatively flat so that we wouldn't be slowed by waves, but I had been naive. We were. It also turned to rain, hard vicious rain, torrential rain. Moving on and not to dwell on our predicament and which of course we did eventually, the sun did make an appearance and we did get to Flamborough Head, later than we wanted but at least we got there. At this point, the wind had pretty much died so at least the engine, which had been on since the beginning, was not having to work to push the boat against wind and sea, as the sea was now flatter too. So things were looking up, at least they were until, when it was Julie's turn to helm and I was down below resting, I heard her squeal 'flies, thousands of flies!'. Now I don't know about thousands but there were hundreds and hundreds of soft, jet black bug - type things with feathery mouthparts, everywhere. They settled on everything and itched where they crawled, it was most unsettling. Fortunately, after an hour or so the wind came back, now from the South or SSW and they gradually dispersed. It was a strange episode, I'm just glad that they only had feathery and not biting mouthparts
Flamborough Head
!By 9 o'clock we were approaching Spurn Head. Later than we'd anticipated but the initial few hours had cost us a good hour in time. C'est la vie. The only concern we now had was whether the anchorage at Spurn Head was tenable in a SW wind. It was forecast to increase to F7 over the next 24 hours but we figured that we would take a gamble that it would appear later rather than sooner. I was also aware that now that the tide had turned, it would be flowing out of the Humber and that we would have a current to contend with, but it was rated as 3.5 knots during Spring tides (now) and I figured that if we kept to the shallow areas we would be out of the main current and anyway, we could do 6 knots at a pinch so we could fight it. What I didn't reckon on was the negative impact of turbulent water on boat speed, it really does have an effect. That and as I later found out from talking to a local, the currents are regularly in the region of 5 knots plus. The net of all this is that after the best part of 2 hours fighting to get to our anchorage with virtually no forward progress, we finally gave up and turned to the south east, towards Norfolk.
