The Cursed Anchorage

The events of our first visit to Cherbourg were both confusing and stupid.

Confusing to me because I was being stupid.

But they lead to a split in the group. James and Niall headed back to the UK for a while, leaving me and Tom in charge of the vessel in their absence.

The specifics of what brought this about I'll go over in a future post, but for the moment, the important information is that we were down to two and figuring out our options.

We surmised that we could handle just the two of us on the open water, we were the most experienced of the group in terms of seamanship anyway and get on pretty well when we weren't not.

We settled on The Netherlands as our next destination.

Amsterdam is gorgeous and a place we'd both been to in the past, it may be cold, but people are friendly.

Besides, insomnia had been kicking in lately and I hadn't been eating much. I hear they have some fantastic herbal supplements for both things available over the counter.

And so it was settled.

We readied the ship, plotted the course and off we went, slinking out of the harbour just after sunset into a peaceful night on the waves.

If you've ever sailed the Bay de Seine in anything approaching a large vessel, you may be aware that the French like 'em small and their harbours show it.

Not a damn stop-over down the whole bay could handle our size, so convincing ourselves that there must be nothing to see there anyway and the food was probably crap and expensive and really that it was our decision, we opted to make for a harbour just north of La Havre, a place called Fécamp, that according to the liars online, should be able to house us.

This would still be a fairly long trip, so we decided to break it up a little by anchoring just down the coast outside a tiny village called Barfleur.

This was our first mistake.

Barfleur was gorgeous of course, as is tradition for tiny French villages perched in the coastal countryside, but upon arriving, we found the marked anchorage was littered from end-to-end with the tiny bobbing flags of a billion lobster pots.

Cursing our luck we trailed further from the harbour, little by little, every time we thought we had spied an opening, lo-and-behold, another marker would reveal itself from over a crest and off we would potter, further and further from the town.

At least half an hour later, we found a likely looking spot.

I peered around suspiciously, but no marker could be seen in the area, which was lucky as there wasn't really anywhere to go from there, we were at the furthest point on the harbour plan and any further out would take us into anchor-incognita, the waters of hidden obstacles and probably even more lobster pots.

The radio crackled a few times and the voice of a fairly official-sounding French lady came calling over it, followed by a couple of other voices, but being English in a foreign country, the very definition of an impassive spectator, I ignored it.

This turned out to be the wrong attitude as a little while later, outside, a voice rung out over the surf.

“Bonjour! Bonjour!”

Confused and a little startled, I popped my head from within the cabin and came face-to-face with a local fisherman, smiling at me from the deck of his boat.

Evidently my confusion and ethnically-mandated expression of polite bemusement didn't translate the nature of my origin, which prompted a machine-gun fire of French to be rapped in my direction, to which I smiled and let out the traditional English nervous laugh, followed by the equally traditional greeting of a Brit abroad, “No parley-vous Francáis” pronounced with perfect awfulness.

This seemed to work, “Ah! English!” he replied acccentedly, then went on to explain in flawless English that the lady I had heard earlier was port control from (La Havre?) and wanted to know what we were doing.

I explained that I hadn't understood the message and assumed it wasn't for me, punctuated with apologies and assured him I would call them back, to which he smiled pleasantly at me and went on his way, assumedly to lay more lobster pots.

I did call back and all they wanted to know was where I came from last and originally and to make sure I wasn't a terrorist or something.

After explaining that I was English and we got all of that out of our system in the distant past, they wished me well for the night and I heard no more for the rest of the evening.

A quick meal was shared and Tom went to bed, giving me the first shift on anchor watch as the orange painted sky began to run, leaving behind the canvas of night.

The night was beautiful, being so close to Barfleur's lighthouse, the beam from which carved striking, silent arcs through the darkness, carving the night into little chunks that drifted off on the cool breeze.

I tried to take a photo, but it came out indistinguishable and currently resides on my old phone which lives no more unfortunately, so if you want to see something close to a photo of it, find a film photograph that was half-way through being processed in a dark room when someone opened the door and you've about got it.

The rest of my shift on watch passed without issue.

I got a lot of reading done and eat a sandwich.

It was rather tasteless.

The sandwich I mean, the book was a Discworld novel, which are always a great read, but the sandwich was extraordinarily bland.

We swapped over close to eleven and after a short, but tranquil sleep, Tom got me up in the early hours of the morning, well before sunrise so we could leave on favourable tide.

You may be wondering at this point what was such a mistake about our decision to anchor.

We got a beautiful serene night. Good rest, good reading and mediocre food. Overall it sounds pretty positive.

But you see, dear reader, Barfleur, despite its beauty and peace, is a trap.

Three in the morning was when we readied to leave, with a plan for me to finish my sleep once we were on the move.

We were ready and rearing to go when we got up on deck and after I took the helm and Tom set to work on our anchor Bruce.

Bruce is a great anchor to have. He's strong, cool under pressure and extremely versatile, but he can also be a bastard to get up some mornings.

This morning, he had decided that 3am wasn't an appropriate time for anything and wasn't getting out of bed until the sun did.

Tom tugged and heaved this way and that, but he was having none of it, Bruce having took roost in whatever crevice he had settled into for the night and pulled the covers over his head.

After going at it with the engine for a moment and still having no luck, I popped up to the front to see if I could help more manually.

We tugged and winched, pulled and hooked him by the electronic windless (Which I should mention at this point, does not work), but were barely making any difference.

Part way through, we hooked the anchor over just as he tugged back, resulting in it slipping free from the fastening and with the help of a wandering gust of wind, pulled out nearly the whole eighty meters of damn chain to join him.

We swapped positions many times, huffing and puffing as we hauled inch-over-inch out of the darkened depths.

Cold had sunk its teeth into our red-raw hands and the ache of our muscles was further worsened by the demoralising slowness of our progress.

But continue we did, until the chain had gone from trailing angle off into the sea, to almost vertical, straight down below the boat.

I signalled for Tom to hop to the helm and with careful use of shackles, fastenings and winches, hauled with all my might on the last part of the chain.

Suddenly, I was thrown back as the chain went unexpectedly limp, but luckily, still fastened tightly in my hands.

I shouted to Tom, who in turn gunned the engine to keep us from drifting away in the tide and continued pulling the now slackened chain up the last stretch.

It took three hours in total to dredge the anchor from those murky depths and it was an utterly joyless experience to start the day off with, especially considering it cut firmly into my sleeping time that was supposed to continue the moment we left the bay, but eventually he was back aboard and snug in his bow roller.

With that finally sorted, Tom turned us outward and urged our vessel onward, back into the gently rolling expanse of the open water.

As Bruce clinked gently into his roller and I lay panting on the deck, I noticed a black shape obscuring his entire spaded head, its bulging shape just visible through the darkness.

I carefully inched to the pulpit, peered over, dazzled myself with the bicolour, before being slightly less stupid and peering under instead.

I tentatively extended my arm and prodded, it was soft and damp, but definitely not alive or lovecraftian in nature, so I took hold and with a little effort, pulled and twisted it from the hook.

As I stepped back and examined the mess it began to resolve.

In my hands lay the remains of an ancient, unmarked and apparently unsuccessful lobster pot.

I took it over to Tom and we both had a little half-hearted laugh, pretending we weren't extremely pissed off that we had spent a great deal of our morning trying to dislodge ourselves from the same thing we had spent a good deal of our previous evening specifically trying to avoid and after swearing quietly at it a couple of times for peace-of-mind, I threw it back from whence it came, hopefully too far out to ruin someone else's morning.

So, over three hours behind schedule and in a little lower spirits and after a little more lobster-pot slalom, we were heading for the horizon once more, this time for a trip that would prove to be much more fun than the last and with much fewer mishaps.

Between ten and fifteen knots most of the time and with merely a couple of ferries to dodge, it was a blast of a trip, but more was yet to come and our trials were far from over, but for now, we let the bliss take over and enjoyed the waves once more.