Dolphins and Smokies

goodbye Peterhead

Alarm at 0500, to leave at 0600 (need time for porridge before a long day).  Managed to leave Peterhead at 0615 with no wind and a large oily swell.  Put up the mainsail anyway - it's our usual policy to put it up while it's easy, and when motoring in swells it acts as a stabiliser to dampen the rolling.  We'd decided to do a long one, missing out Stonehaven and going straight to Arbroath, 65 miles straight down the coast - no tricky navigation and no nasty tide-race headlands. Put on the auto-pilot and sit back.



Arbroath (of the Smokies - smoked fish - fame) has a locked marina (the outer harbour dries at low tide), so if we didn't get there by 1945 we'd be out all night.  Consequently we did some careful calculations taking into account tide 'with' and 'against' (roughly 6 hours each), to work out where we should be down our long straight line at each hour - that way we could tell if we were falling behind.

he thinks we are a trawler

So the day proceeded, 2 hour watches: the on-watch person looking out for other boats (plenty of those around Aberdeen) and lobster buoys (plenty of those at random), and gazing at the coast (clear for once) and any wildlife (if I never see another guillemot it will be too soon); the off-watch person goes below and eats, sleeps, reads, and makes log entries.  Occasionally seagulls would fly behind us, presumably thinking we were a trawler carrying fish possibilities.

The wind teased us with the occasional F2-3 but it was never sailable (i.e. always on the nose) and it never lasted; we don't have time to be tacking, we have to make the lock deadline.  We only saw one other yacht all day, going the other way with a flappy mainsail (ours was beautifully tight :-).  We purred on, with a calmer sea, keeping a little ahead of schedule.

Then around 1600 it all changed.  Within 15 minutes it changed from SE F1 to W F6 - we briefly saw 32kn of wind across the deck, plus a lot of spray as the seas built up very quickly.  After crashing along for a while, and within a few miles of Arbroath,  we decided it would be prudent to drop the mainsail before the wind and seas built further.  Again, 'hoorah' for the autopilot - it keeps the boat into the wind while both of us drop the sail.  Then on we crashed, rolling more now without our 'stabiliser', cursing our luck that every day seems to end with strenuous effort, risk of injury, and seawater in the face.

Our curses faded when 4 or 5 dolphins suddenly appeared beside the boat, just a few feet away.  They shadowed us, raced away, jumped, came back ... and it's so difficult to photograph them because they are so fast and the boat is rolling.

Eventually we made it through the narrow rocky entrance into the neat little marina at Arbroath, tied up by 1845.  Switched everything off, got the key and code for the facilities, cooked up a stir-fry, and toasted another tiring but successful day, albeit with no proper sailing.  We accept that this part of the journey is a 'delivery' - we just have to get on.