ONBOARD Adrian Morgan
of the depression, perhaps? That chilling moment in The Perfect Storm came to mind, when the sun comes out and they all dare to believe things are going to get better. And don’t. In our case they did, or at least got no worse as on wet but clear roads we made home in under five hours. Whereupon the window closed, with a bang.
Avoiding bad weather S
A storm-wracked Adrian recalls an earlier dash for home
hortly before I write this, the weather gauge at Ardmair, a few miles west, peaked at 80mph. It’s 8 December, the day the anemometer on Cairngorm topped 160mph. A day when nature makes the decisions. Deciding when to make a dash north, by road, was akin to making a similar decision ahead of a severe gale a few years back when we took Sally on a three-day cruise to the Hebrides. Then it was when to cut and run for Ullapool from Stornoway: but the same anxiety; the same obsessive studying of weather forecasts and maps; the same appeal for advice from anyone with a credible opinion. And then, no more prevarication... go for it. Now, with a deep depression heading for central Scotland, Edinburgh, where we were, was certain to be hit hard. And as the low headed Norway-wards, the winds would start hammering down from the northwest, hitting Ullapool, where we were headed. It was a classic weather window: head north early, and outrun the wind; reach Ullapool before the conditions turned icy, bringing blizzards to the high ground we would need to cross. Or hang about in Edinburgh for another two days. We went, crossing the Forth half an hour before they closed the bridge for all traffic. Slipping and sliding over Drumochter Pass, battling a headwind that slowed us to 40mph, we made Inverness in bright sunshine; the eye
70 CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2012
Which brought back that trip from Stornoway; the chat with the harbourmaster, close scrutiny of weather charts. Anxiety; prevarication; decision. And off into the black, deepening night, triple reefed, working jib set, snugged down for the Minch crossing, hearts beating a little faster with the butterfly flutter of incipient worry. Humphrey Barton, who famously sailed a Vertue (like Sally) to America in 1950, was quite clear about weather. “Bad weather? Avoid it,” which sounds to me pretty sensible. Who sails willingly into the teeth of a storm? Well, there are some. A bunch of servicemen took a Contessa 32, I think it was, through the Raz de Sein in a gale just for the hell of it. At one point – can you believe
it? – their keel hit bottom in a monstrous trough and, I suspect, they all reckoned it was a huge laugh. Not for me. Bad weather? I suggest like Humphrey you avoid it, or make sure your window of opportunity is indeed open long enough to squeeze through. In our case – both cases – it was. The night was long and pitch dark, the wind Force 6 and rising. Sally is pretty low slung, and as she rose to the swell building from the south west, and dropped into the trough, water raced down the side decks, slopping over the coamings into the non-draining cockpit.
“It was a classic weather window: outrun the wind or wait another two days”
In a Richter scale of epic journeys, it may rank 0.1, and yet there’s no doubting a dark night in a small boat in the Minch with a rising wind is quite enough anxiety for me, at least. We’d made the sensible decision to use that window to get home, rather than kick our heels in Stornoway. And so, relieved and weary (we’d not slept for 22 hours) we hit the sack, and slept... for about 22 hours. Which suggests we might have been better to ignore the window and sail a day later. But, much as I like the place, who wants to hang about in Stornoway on the Sabbath?
CHARLOTTE WATTERS
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