When night nav goes wrong…
“You’ve got to be joking!” muttered Susie from deep under the duvet, ‘This is meant to be a holiday!’
She had a point. Four in the morning is not the sort of time you expect to be getting up in the middle of a holiday, and I have to say that I wasn’t enjoying the early start any more than she was.
We’d anchored for the night in a snug reach of the Tréguier River, about two miles north of the town itself, after an uncomfortable and very wet passage up the coast from Trebeurden the day before. It was the end of our two-week sailing holiday on the coast of Brittany, and we were on our way home.
Over supper, we’d decided to head straight back across the Channel in the morning, taking advantage of a short window of favourable weather before the squalls and low cloud blew back in again. The forecast was almost entirely perfect for this: moderate westerly winds, backing to the southwest, broken cloud and intermittent sunshine.
The only drawback was the timing: to make the best of the tidal streams round the outside of Guernsey and the Casquets, we’d have to have to get up very much earlier than we might have wished.
When we did eventually struggle was tugging gently at the anchor cable, as if impatient for the next adventure. She’s an Island Packet 380; a lovely, solid and reliable cruising boat that had happily taken us around the Mediterranean while I was working in Naples, and was now based at the Joint Services Marina in Portsmouth.
