Blogs

Peterhead is a welcome shelter on the exposed coast of north east Scotland and lurking around the corner is a legendry danger spot – Rattray Head. It can be a devil with strong wind against tide, or even just with the tide we are told. So having settled nicely in to a very quiet Peterhead Marina with its modern facilities and helpful staff we wondered if we might spend some time there soaking up the local ambience.

At the back of the marina is a rather large and imposing building which one ventured to think might be a museum or some such place of interest but upon enquiry it transpired that this is no place for holiday visitors, rather more for prison visitors. ‘I wouldn’t go too near there, confided our friend in the marina, some pretty hard cases up there’.

Sailing up the east coast of the UK seems to be bleak involving long journeys before finding a marina to break the journey, but all Tim’s planning has now fallen into place and we have stayed in some fascinating docks, marinas and fishing ports.

Since my last blog we have practically motored right up the east coast and the next HPO was on the east coast of Scotland and we spent 1½ days in Arbroath, a very pretty dock marina surrounded by the typical grey stone houses, fishing sheds and being a Sunday, people strolling around, some sitting down eating huge ice creams and others attempting to eat fish and chips with flocks of seagulls waiting expectantly for the chance to grab a chip and the pungent smoke from the Arbroath Smokies drifting across the marina all day.

When I heard that the Little Ship Club Temperance League, of which I am a committed member, was going to foreign parts to engage in missionary work I, of course, jumped at the chance to lend a hand.

So it was that I motored away from Burnham on Crouch in Silver Pearl on a clear Thursday evening together with crew Mark “H2O” Hynds and Hugh “more water” Daley in calm, windless conditions despite the forecast of gales that was given 48 hours previously. Calais was the destination (this being the 86th Calais rally) where our teetotal ministrations were so sorely needed and as we crossed the Thames estuary with nary a problem, my reflections on the good work that we were going to perform kept me warm long into the cold night.

Our departure from Grimsby and the River Humber was another with doubt about the weather, this time warm moist air rolling in from the south west which could only mean the threat of fog. The forecast was one of calm winds with the chance of fog patches and a more sinister warning of fog banks. Clearly in addition to the horrors inflicted upon us by our nation’s banks they were now ready to release fog upon us, perhaps with virtual fog bank cash machines lurking out there somewhere. Is your correspondent starting to hallucinate? Yes that was actually a pot buoy over there.