Fog in the Channel is never nice, and for Pippa’s second trip to France this year there was lots of it. Warm moist air, cold sea – all that’s needed is a nice bit of breeze and the visibility goes to nothing, usually in the ‘shipping lanes’, where this photo of a cargo ship less than a mile away was taken! (My second photo shows the same thing without the fog on the way back.) A time to be thankful for modern electronic gadgets…
Leaving Weymouth in the dark on Friday morning, though, I discovered that the GPS wasn’t feeding the DSC or the AIS, which nearly led to me turning back, but having consulted the manual I ‘reset the interface setting’ and all was well. The trip was chilly if uneventful until some miles south-east of Portland it got a bit hazy, and then steadily got worse, with very restricted visibility from then on all the way across.
A regular pattern of checking visually, on radar and on AIS makes such a passage less nerve-racking; the great thing about AIS is that even the simplest version gives me COG and SOG for each target, thus making it possible to plan well in advance how I am going to deal with shipping, or with fishing boats, the two major sources of worry. An accompanying radar sweep will show if there is anything around without AIS on – on the way back I noticed the lights of a pair trawl a long time before they appeared on AIS, possibly turning theirs back on only when they saw my lights.
Pleasant weather over the weekend made it all worthwhile – lunch in the cockpit, market on Saturday in town and at Octeville on Sunday in bright Spring sunshine (worth the trip up the hill!) One of the the things I wanted to spend a bit of time doing was to photograph the alabaster reliefs in Holy Trinity church, which date from the English occupation of Cherbourg during the Hundred Years' War, one of which is shown here.
Leaving early on Monday morning, I came back with a steady SW breeze to arrive mid-afternoon with only a brief spell of poor visibility in rain before dawn – again amongst the shipping!
A well-found ship (and if you’ve watched Steve Pitman savage your seacocks you’ll know if yours is!), a pot of tea and a slice of homemade cake – these go with the electronics to make cruising at this time of year a way of getting even more from your sailing…
Steve Fraser
Submitted on 28th February 2012