Crossing the North Sea
There are three ways of getting to the Baltic from Tollesbury. OK, three sensible ways. There is no reason you could not sail round the top of Norway to the White Sea, nip into the Russian inland waterways system at Belomorsk, sail south through the great lakes of Onega and Ladoga, and drift down the Neva river through St Petersburg to pop out at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland. I believe it has been done. But the more usual routes are by the Skaggerak - the stretch of water, often tumultous, that lies between the north of Denmark and the Norwegian coast - via the Kiel canal that cuts through Germany from her Baltic to North Sea coasts, or through the Limfjord, a shallow winding channel that runs across the north of Denmark. The shortest route for us would have been the Kiel canal, but getting there involves a coastal passage along the shores of the Netherlands and Germany, and the eastern shores of the North Sea are lined with treacherous sandbanks and low-lying islands, with ripping tides making entrance hazardous to the shallow channels that lie between. Onshore winds are frequent, and the coastal route packed with shipping. It didn’t look like an appealing option. The Limfjord on the other hand looked to be quiet, with little commercial traffic and plenty of sheltered water and offshoots to explore. I had decided a long time earlier that that was where we would head first - although I had charts of both the route to the north of Denmark and the landfall for the Kiel canal should we get blown that way.
Our start was not auspicious. The tide had been ebbing for a few hours by the time we were finally shipshape and had slipped from the buoy. There was less and less water in the channel and more and more mud appearing at the edges. We had left it too late – we ran aground almost immediately, although we were able to get free again by pushing off with the oars. But the channel shallowed further on, and although we were between the buoys that marked the deepest water, there was no longer enough depth for us to get out. Once again we hit the putty, and this time stayed there as the last of the tide swept past us.
Julian went below to get some sleep as we sat there with the water disappearing from under us, and I stayed up to keep an eye on things. We were in absolutely no danger, but I felt a bit of a fool to be sitting there drying out only a couple of hundred yards into the voyage, and especially stupid having done the same thing coming into the creek. I felt rather morose, and wondered again if I had bitten off more than I could chew.
What goes down must come up, and it wasn’t so long before the muddy water flowing past slowed, and slowed some more, and sat stationary for a little while, then ever so gradually began to creep back into the creek. We became more and more upright, and finally I felt Teal stir beneath me. We were afloat, and this time had no problem sailing out the last turns in the channel as dusk began to fall.
I stayed alone on deck as we slowly wound our way out past the spits and sandbanks that lie off the Blackwater entrance, and turned our head north-east up the Wallet to take us past Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton and Walton-on-the-Naze with their colourful beach huts, Martello towers and piers. The following wind was light, and we had just enough speed to make way over the incoming tide.
By the time it was fully dark we were in relatively open waters, and I woke Julian to take over. Throughout the crossing we operated an unconventional watch system. Instead of the traditional four hours on, four off, we simply swapped when we felt like it. Occasionally things would be peaceful enough for the man below to get a full six or seven hours sleep – rest we really needed when we could get it.
I slept fitfully that first night at sea. It was close to midsummer now so the night was short, and it was already light when I came on deck again. All that day we drifted gently north up the coast. By evening we were somewhere off Lowestoft, where a large group of uncharted wind turbines had sprung up on one of the offshore sandbanks. Uncharted on my second-hand charts at least, but it makes life much more exciting to have the odd surprise sprung on you. For a while we were becalmed.
All through the next day and night too the winds remained gentle, but slowly we crept offshore and the lights of Lowestoft slipped quietly below the western horizon. We soon saw the first oilrigs in the distance, spidery alien contraptions standing tall and menacing from the water. I was aiming for a lonely buoy that marked the corner of the shipping lanes off the Dutch coast, and was reassured to find my navigation so far had been reasonably accurate. We spotted it just where we expected it, a little red blob bobbing serenely in the midst of a wide sea.
We were now moving well in a following breeze, and set our course to pass close to some of the oil fields, as they were then our only means of getting a fix of our position. Luckily our chart had most of the rigs marked – although working out which was which was not always easy when they were thick around the horizon.
The weather we had experienced to this point had made for an easy passage, if not particularly fast. We made better progress through the next night and day, in a gradually increasing wind. But the depression that we had heard might be approaching was steadily moving east, and by the afternoon of the 23rd it was beginning to get rough. We turned on the radio to try and catch the early evening shipping forecast
It wasn't good. Gales in most sea areas – in our area, German Bight, it was forecast to reach force nine - 'severe gale' - over the next 24 hours. Julian and I crouched with our heads down our companionway to listen to the measured tones of the BBC announcer through the crackling of Julians old car stereo clumsily wired to the battery. A knot was forming in the pit of my stomach. Teal is not a big boat to face a force nine gale. But real sailors aren't meant to worry about mere storms so I tried to be nonchalent as we checked the lashings on the canoe, and reduced sail. The wind had moved round to the south-east, meaning we were now sailing on a beam reach, side on to the waves. I let Julian take the deck for a while, and I tried to get some rest while conditions were still bearable. I don’t think I managed any sleep, and as the wind built up and the odd wave came crashing down on the deck we discovered that although the new decks were sound in most places, we had not sealed the mast step well, and the intermittent gushes of water soaked everything beneath. Worse was the join between the coachroof and the hatch coamings – it leaked incessantly. The only part of the cabin that remained dry was the very bows, and there we crawled shivering when we were off watch to try and get some rest. We had to share that tiny space with any of our clothes that were still dry enough to be worth saving, and the ships guitar – which, remarkably, stayed dry through the whole trip. Julians sleeping bag got soaked fairly early on, so from then on we took turn about with mine.
We were carrying just the small jib by now, our smallest sail. We were making fast progress, but it was increasingly uncomfortable as the waves built up and combers came crashing down from the side to soak the person at the helm. I had rigged a line between the two masts as a lifeline. We clipped our life-jacket lanyards onto it, so there was no danger of being swept overboard.
In the wee small hours, as the heaving, lurching and spray increased I decided it was daft to try and keep sailing the way we wanted to go. Life would be much more comfortable if we took all sail down and drifted with the gale. I joined Julian on deck, inched my way forwards on the tiny heaving side decks, and clipped myself on by the mast. Julian bore off downwind and I lowered the jib and stowed it in the canoe. The wind was now driving us north-west, perpendicular to the course we wanted, but the motion was vastly easier now and the waves crashing down into the cockpit much less frequent. I streamed a thick rope behind us to slow us further, and took the helm for a while to let Julian rest.
The night was pitch black, and our world was reduced to our tiny heaving craft and the light of the navigation lamps reflecting off the foam and spindrift. We took our turns hunched in the back of the cockpit, our backs to the full force of the gale. As we rose on a crest it would batter our oilskins and scream through the rigging, but the waves were big enough, and Teal small enough, that when we were in a trough we were sheltered. An occasional jog at the bilge pump kept the blood moving, for without a self-draining cockpit we needed to pump out every wave that climbed aboard.
It didn't last all that long - over the course of the next day the wind gradually died away, and turned squally. Ironically, by the evening of the 24th we were becalmed. This was the centre of the depression passing over us, and I knew the wind would swing round to the west and increase again soon enough. However, it gave respite enough to cook a hot meal and recover.
We were slightly unsure of our position after the wild night. At one point I had discovered weed round the log line, so we had almost certainly gone quite a few more miles than it had recorded. It was very hard to judge how much, and our course had been equally uncertain for much of the night. We made the best guess we could of where we were, and steered for another group of oil rigs that, if we saw them, would let us fix our position again. Thankfully we did. We passed one at a distance of about half a mile, and could just make out a couple of figures standing outside, watching our passing.
There would be no more oil-rigs, buoys or any other markers to navigate by now until we reached the Danish coast. I tried to be particularly careful in noting our courses steered and the distances measured on the log to make our dead reckoning as accurate as possible.
We caught the forecast again on the 24th, fainter at this distance, and nearly drowned out by static. Despite the calm we were experiencing, there was another gale warning in force for the eastern North Sea, for as the depression continued cartwheeling to the east, the winds would swing round to the north-west in its wake.
It was growing dark on the evening of the 25th as we closed with the Danish coast. We had been at sea less than a week, but we were as excited as little boys to see the land again. The coast is very barren, and south of the entrance to the Limfjord at Thyborøn there is no harbour for over forty miles. We picked up the loom of a lighthouse, flashing a group of two flashes. I looked at the chart – yes, there was a light marked with 2 flashes every 15 seconds at Bovbjerg, to the south of Thyborøn. That must be the one we could see, although it put us rather further south than I had expected. Still, we couldn’t go into Thyborøn in the dark in any case, so we would just sail slowly up the shore and stooge around until light.
The wind was increasing again, but being in no hurry we shortened sail right down and headed up the coast. Midnight found us off the next headland and the lights of a small town, where we hove to. But something was nagging, for what we were seeing didn’t match up quite as I expected with the chart, and beyond this headland the coast seemed to trend round to the east. My mind was grey and woolly with tiredness though, and I didn’t stop to puzzle it through. We hove to, and I left Julian on deck to keep an eye on things while I went below to try to get some much-needed sleep.
It was several hours before I managed to finally drift off. I didn’t have long before Julian woke me urgently. The waves were slowly pushing us ashore, and he had found it hard to judge the distance in the dark – now it seemed we were suddenly getting close to the dunes, and the waves were steepening as the water shelved. In the dim half light we could just make out the webbly skyline of the dunes, and they did seem terrifyingly close. It was freezing cold and I had run on deck wearing very little, and had immediately been soaked by a wave that broke over us, but it was essential we get her sailing again and claw offshore. It meant going hard on the wind, the least comfortable and wettest point of sailing – and the wind had risen to a near-gale again. Shivering violently, I set the sails properly as Julian steered, and gradually we clawed off the coast.
Julian had at least worked out why the coast didn’t match what we were expecting though. In addition to the light I had seen marked, there was another a few miles north that flashed 2 flashes every 20 seconds. I had counted the seconds between the flashes the previous night, but when I got a little over 15 seconds - the interval I had expected from the light at BovBjerg - I had assumed my counting was bad, rather than checking the chart more carefully.
The upshot was that rather than being ten miles to the south of Thyborøn when we made our landfall, we were in fact a few miles too far to the north, and had compounded our mistake by sailing even further to the north. It was a pretty silly mistake to have made, and we now had to sail 25 miles back to the south again to get to Thyborøn. Still, at least we knew where we were, and we would have had to hang around all night in any case as we couldn’t go in in the dark, so it wasn’t the end of the world.
The sail back down the coast was exhilarating. It was blowing a full gale again and the seas had built up enormously. We swooped up and down them, one moment hidden completely in a trough, the next rising until we were on top of the world. It was also rather frightening, because I still wasn’t so confident in all the work we had done to the boat, and it would only take a shroud slipping or a sail blowing out and we would be drifting at the sea's mercy onto a lee shore.
I read the entry in the almanac for Thyborøn. ‘There is a bar over the entrance’ it warns. ‘Do not attempt to enter in onshore winds greater than F5’. The wind was very considerably stronger than that, and even if it should moderate it would take a long time for the waves to die down sufficiently to make the bar safe. I broke the news to Julian that even though we were so close, I didn’t want to risk suicide, and we should probably wait around offshore until conditions moderated.
As we approached the entrance, we spied another sail off in the distance. We weren’t alone! It was only the second yacht we had seen since we left the English coast. It was a long way ahead of us, and to my surprise she turned in and headed across the bar for Thyborøn despite the conditions. She was well ahead of us, so we couldn’t see how she fared, but if she was able to go in, why shouldn’t we? We were extremely tired, cold, wet and miserable – how good it would be to be anchored safely in the quiet sheltered waters of the Limfjord! It was very tempting to trust to fate and keep going. I gave in.
Crossing that bar was the most dangerous thing I have ever done in my life. The last few days, what with the gales and nearly being driven ashore, had put plenty of adrenaline in the bloodstream at times, but they were a like a cosy afternoon cup of tea compared with the roller-coaster ride ahead. The waves were already huge, whipped up by the gales over the long fetch across the sea from northern Scotland. Yet as they felt the shallowing sandy bottom come up to meet them, they grew steeper and higher and closer together, until the frothing crests began to curl over and break. Running down the face of the waves it took all my strength on the tiller to keep Teal's head facing forward as the rushing crest bore down on us and turned our world to foam. Then the bowsprit would point skywards and we would slide helplessly into the trough behind, before with a violent lurch the next sea grabbed us and sent us hurtling forward once again, to surf faster and faster down the face of the next comber.
Finally there came a wave so steep I could no longer hold her, and as the crest broke upon us we broached sideways, and half the North Sea poured upon us into the cockpit. How she turned her head back again to meet the next wave stern on, I’m not sure, but I hate to think what would have happened if she had not done so. That was thankfully the worst. Just a few hundred yards further on we were in calm, sheltered water.