Ain't Going Nowhere

By David Bewley

Ain't Going Nowhere follows on from 'Small Boat Big Plans' and looks at how plans and life has had to adapt due to Covid 19, especially when the plan was to live and travel aboard a small boat. We chart the excitment, and then into the dawning of dissapointment as the pandemic takes hold. Then how we managed to put some milage under our belts before the second lockdown loomed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Bewley
• Release date: Dec 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201247423

David Bewley

David was born in Leeds in the UK in 1957 to a hard working, working class family. He grew up, and developed as an engineer, working in that industry for 30 years. From an early age he developed a kean interest in motor racing and formula 1, and all mechanical things.  For a time he was deeply involved in UK kart racing, even racing for a time against stars of the future. Although it was far too late for him, he was in his mid 30's. At the age of forty he suffered a heart attack, which meant he had to stop some of his more strenious activities, and during a period of recuperation in 1997 he penned his first novel 'The Diamond Seat'. Further novels followed some years later, with "The Extinguisher" and then the final one in that series "The extinguisher, Revenge". Planning for retirement, he and his wife of 42 years bought a boat, in which they plan to cruise around the British Isles. They are sure there will be more books to follow, logging thier avdventures along the way.

Book preview

Chapter 1.

So, what a year 2020 was to choose to change our lifestyle, and set out on what for us, two not so old, old farts, and our two cats, would be a dream and adventure.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Let’s look back to where we finished up last year in 2019, and in our previous book ‘Small Boat Big Plans’.

That year in August saw us finish our first true out to sea journey, running from what was our then base York, down the Ouse, the Humber to Hull, and then on out to sea and into Wells Next the Sea (which isn’t), and back to our new home port of Hull. The run back to Hull, being without incident, nearly everything running to plan. We are on a boat, so plans tend to change as quickly as the weather. Being a skipper is all about making sure you have a level of flexibility and can quickly change your plans. So, when I say almost, that means we set off on time, and made it to our destination port on time. Our glitch was the navigation systems we were using.

Tablets and twenty-year-old nav tech isn’t really up to the job, and you can’t rely on them to keep you on track and safe.

As the skipper I am solely responsible for the safe keeping of my passengers, (the love of my live, the wife, and our two cats Kit and Pepe) and my vessel. So, my first job on returning was to review our journey, looking at the positives, and the negatives.

The run down causes us some issues. We had problems caused by the wind, it was from the south, and once the tide turned, we ran into wind over tide swells, so the sea state went from flat calm one minute to quite a lot of chop the next. This also coincided with a sea floor change, the course I had set hadn’t fully taken into account those bottom changes. The timing of the tide and wind together with the overfalls on the sea floor really upset things up top.

Also did you know Samsung tablets and compasses don’t go together. So whilst I knew what magnetic course I needed to be on, putting my tablet next to the compass meant I lost the heading.

I said earlier a skipper has to be quick thinking and assess situations. I quickly realised we were off course and readdressed the issue.

Sorry jumped ahead a bit.

When the sea state came up, we got a soaking from the amount of spray coming over our fly bridge. This soaked my Samsung tablets screen, which knocked out Navionics. We had to abandon the fly bridge for the lower helm, not easy when you are being tossed about. Janet took over the lower helm while I climbed down. Once I was inside she passed the helm over to me, and I threw the tablet on top of the lower helm, next to the compass, at the same time Janet turned green and dashed out of the saloon to go feed the fish. I watch her go to make sure she was safe, then looking back saw we were of course according to the compass, so turning to bring us back on course, I noticed the compass didn’t move. That’s when It dawned on me. So moving the tablet showed the actual heading, and by then we were ninety degrees or so of course. We ended up doing a full 360 to get back, plus move the boat out of the rough seas, to calmer waters about ½ a mile away.

For our run home, the Samsung tablet again chose to give problems. All the time we were in Wells, it worked fine. Allowed me to plan my route back, loading up every time I wanted it to. Come the morning we wanted to leave, it didn’t. Navionics crashed every time I tried to run it. Whilst in port I had set up the old Autohelm nav station, but the levels of detail and speed were not really usable, luckily I had my older Acer tablet with Navionics loaded, so we were able to run with this, allowing us safe passage.

The lessons I learned from this were, first and foremost triple check your planned course, and passage plan on timings for being at certain way points. Never put any device close to your compass. Upgrade the navigation to something that is designed for the job.

So a new MFD (multi function display) was required. We plunged for a Raymarine Axiom display, with Navionics chart plotting. This would then as funds allowed, or the Boss saying ok, we could continue to build and upgrade the equipment on Ava Grace.

Being back in Hull meant we would no longer be able to live aboard and commute to work as we had been doing in York. Therefore, we would resort back to weekenders until we closed the shop and left the flat in February 2020.

From August to the end of the year went in a blur, I wish I could say the weekdays were spent working, and at the weekends we were out on the boat. Sad to say not the case, yes, the weekdays were at work in the shop, but weekends, whilst at the boat working, we didn’t get the amount of running we wanted. The tides or the weather were wrong, or when they were right, we had other things to do. That’s life.

One bit of great news happened in the autumn, not personal, and not boating. In April 2019 I was asked to attend a meeting in the Palace of Westminster (houses of Parliament) with the Flood Minister, and other government officials, in my capacity as Co-Ordinator for the Tadcaster Flood Action group. This meeting was to present our case for government backing for funding to allow improvements to Tadcasters flood defences.

We as a group had kept the meeting quite low key, but it was critical, because without government backing and funding it wasn’t going to happen. Anyhow, in the early autumn I received a call from our MP, informing me that at a press conference the following morning it would be announced that we had been successful, this had to remain secret, until after the press conference, but I needed to prepare myself for an onslaught of calls the next day.

I really can’t describe how happy I felt, I was leaving the town, I had worked hard with a team for the previous 4 years on flooding issues, suffered flooding myself, but I wasn’t leaving them without a solution. I had played a part in securing the town from experiencing what we had gone through in December of 2015 again for the future. I could leave happy.

Chapter 2

Christmas of 2019 was like many the world over, a family affair, for us with our plans though it may be the last one for a couple of years.

For Christmas day we travelled down to our daughters at RAF Henlow, it was also a little bit special because our son in law Dan was due to be posted to Afghanistan for six months early 2020, so it was to be a bit of a send off for him.

We attended the base Christmas carol concert, lots of coughs going around.

Traveling back home the next day we saw our son and his partner, and also had an invite to a thankyou drinks reception put on by our local MP follow his victory in the elections. Where we could rub shoulders with the great and good, or not so good of Selby and Ainsty.

Then a few days