Hey Blog! Second post on sailing; and it’s my ship’s log!
Day 1 – 7th April 2024
· Come aboard. Tour the vessel – she’s a lovely boat!
· Safety Briefings – what to do in the event of various emergencies: Flood, Fire, Man overboard, and Abandon ship. The general rule is alert the crew, grab your lifejacket and get on deck!
· On deck safety briefings. E.g. in rough weather, clip on to the safety lines that run along the deck with the harness on your lifejacket; don’t get hit by the boom as it comes across; and don’t slip on the slippery skylights!
· Lifejacket safety – the lifejackets we had were self-inflating in water, but if for whatever reason they failed to inflate, you could pull the red cord at the bottom to manually inflate. They came with an harness to keep you attached to the vessel in the unlikely event that you were washed overboard.
I am PORT WATCH & PORT AFT CABIN (bottom bunk). There are two watches on a boat: port and starboard, after the left and right sides of the ship. On this voyage there were five members of starboard watch and six of port watch, along with the four sea staff – Dan, the captain or skipper, Becky, the 1st Mate, Reggie, the 2nd Mate, and Harvey, the 4th Hand.
· Dinner cooked by port watch, so I helped.
· We start the game of Boat Murder. This is a tradition on the JL. At the start of the voyage you draw pieces of paper naming a place, a person, and a thing from three cups. Over the course of the voyage, you have to hand that person that thing in that place, which ‘kills’ them. Kind of like active Cluedo. This is a brilliant game but may lead to everyone on board being distrustful of each other and not accepting anything from anyone without them putting it down first! For the rest of the evening we played card games, till it was time for the story and bed. Tonight’s story was about the search for the perfect coffee bean!
Day 2 – 8th April 2024
· Wake up and have breakfast. Swab the decks and get a theory lesson about how to use the sails and other sailing equipment. Make sail and cast off!
· Motor out the harbour. We hoist the staysail, to balance the steering. Gybe up the Tamar river and anchor under the bridge for lunch. We have a knotting session down below, doing Figure of 8, Round turn and two half-hitches, and Bowline. All of these I know, so I got through this with ease and helped to teach some others who were struggling. [See How long is a piece of string (with knots in it?), 2nd Nov. 2023 for more knots.]
· We get back under way and motor down the river. Back at sea, we have a game where we race around the deck to find whichever object the skipper called out. Then we have a man overboard drill – luckily no one has to take a dip, we use a black buoy with a bucket tied to it as the casualty. Thankfully we are able to recover this substitute and then motor back to port, where we spend the rest of the day playing games and having fun. This evening’s story was a recitation of The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Tennyson.
Day 3 – 9th April 2024
· After the daily shipkeeping tasks, we go ashore for showers as the weather is horrible. I haven’t got off JL since I stepped aboard on Sunday – it feels strange that we haven’t been outside of our ‘house’ as it were, yet we’ve gone so far and seen so much!
· Showers over, we have a Rules of the Road at Sea session. This is less who has right of way and more who should give way to whom, though all vessels have a mutual responsibility to prevent incidents. I would recommend the Flip Cards on marine subjects (I have Rules of the Road, Code Flags, Lights and Shapes, and Buoyage system) to learn more about them. There is a long list of rules, but it would be too long for this blog!
· Look around the engine room. The engine on JL is not fast but has a lot of torque, so it will still drive her in very heavy conditions, even if quite slowly. If all fuel tanks are full, she can be motored from Plymouth to the Isle of Wight before refuelling, but that would empty all the tanks. We must be careful not to set the fuel on fire, as that would look like you were on the losing end of a game of battleships and result in a sunk boat.
· The final thing before we set sail is to climb the bowsprit. As you can see from last week’s picture of the boat, the end of the bowsprit is a good length beyond the bow, and is above only water. So going up it is quite scary the first time. However, I manage it and get all the way up and then back on the opposite side.
· Set sail again. Once out of the harbour, it is very choppy and there was a swell running. We spend the afternoon tacking around the sound, before anchoring out in the bay just across into Cornwall.
· After the sails and anchor chain go down, we put the ‘anchored light’ up. This is a single black ball, made by two interlocking circles, with a single white light under it. To all vessels, this means “I am anchored”. Useful if you want to prevent a collision with a moving boat after dark!
· Dinner. We have cake for pudding as it’s someone’s birthday! Party games and stargazing after dinner, the sky is marvellous, and we see several constellations. Finally, we go to bed.
Day 4 – 10th April 2024
· Wake up, breakfast and deck scrub
· Points of sail lesson (the various angles at which a boat can be sailed according to the wind).
· Sails up and tack out, heading for round the headland and to the next town. Far too big a swell and people seasick and throwing up. Turn back. – n.b. If you are not seasick, but sea-nervous, like me, you should have a ginger biscuit, look at the deck or the horizon, and recite a poem, or a passage of a book, over and over again. Trust me, it helped!
· Once back past the breakwater, we have some lovely sailing. The swell is less, but the waves are the right size for learning and the wind is nice. However, I still get hit right down the nose by the port outer jib sheet when trying to readjust the sails! We sail around for a bit, then head back up the river we had gone to two days before. Have lunch.
· Tack and head down the river, sailing back for last night’s anchoring spot. I get the inner jib down and stowed, which requires going up the bowsprit again! Less nervous this time, I had the job of stowing the sail to think about. By the time we get to the bay, it is too rough, so in the end we go back to the marina for that night.
· Games, dinner, more games, then all ashore for showers. The ground keeps rocking and whenever I close my eyes, it has waves in it…!
· Story and bed
Day 5 – 11th April 2024
· Wake up, breakfast, wash up, make sail and cast off.
· VERY foggy. Good lookout needed, especially as there are a cruise ship with an entourage of taxi boats to transport visitors from ship to shore and vice versa, and several ferries off Plymouth shore. On four sails we make pretty good speed, and get out quite quickly. Because it is so foggy, and the visibility at Very Poor, we are Out Of Sight Of Land – VERY COOL! It’s rather fun. Even though we could have seen the land if the visibility was Good, I would count it as being away from any terra firma.
· Brunch, and lunch. Sausage rolls and jacket potatoes, respectively.
· I take the wheel. Long stint, tacking during the duration. So fun! Standing at the wheel, you have the whole ship at your command, save for the sails; you do need to turn the wheel quite a way for the ship to turn, but she will come.
· Get the lower square sail, the coarse, up. It is hoisted by three pullies, one which also holds the staysail, and two which are also used to move the dinghy. Only used when sailing downwind, it is the second largest sail on board, and is very effective. However, you don’t feel you’re going fast, because you must take into account the speed of the boat downwind as well as the apparent wind speed.
· Sail back to land, downwind. Sails down and anchor the same as two nights ago. Dinner, Clear up, games, story, and bed.
Day 6 – 12th April 2024
· Wake up, breakfast, general tidy up as we motor back to harbour. Clean the whole boat. Get everything ready to disembark, and finally leave the Johanna Lucretia at 12:00.
But this isn’t the end of the story! I intend to go back, sometime next year, and have more fun on the ocean wave. So “farewell and adieu to you readers of my blog” * and see you soon! ARRRR!
*See Spanish Ladies, the sea shanty