Lowestoft 2007

Earlier this year two friends and I crossed over to the UK with Dannick. Michiel and Daan were my shipmates for this trip and it was the maiden crossing for both of them. We departed from Muiden late in the afternoon after a safety briefing and motored across the IJsselmeer through the locks of Amsterdam onto the northsea canal. We had our dinner cooked by Michiel.

We went through the locks at IJmuiden at dusk and set for sea. The sea was a bit choppy and it took a little bit of getting used to but we settled in quickly. We tracked quite a few targets with our new AIS system. This works really great and I would recomend it to everyone. We hardly used the new radar system because AIS gave us far more detailed information. What helped best was the "Closest point of approach" which means how close are we going to cross (under a mile was a red light for us) and the time to CPA which means how long will it be until we need to take action. Sometimes this was pretty quick as some large cargo vessles sail at an alarming rate.

At one point we were hailed on the VHF by a Dutch submarine from the Dutch Royal Navy. They were looking for a missing yacht and wanted to know our sailnumbers. This made us think a little more of the magnitude of this little trip of ours. The autohelm did most of the work once we were at sea. We checked our headings and checked and rechecked the AIS and Radar every so often until first light. The wind turned a bit to our aft quarter which made it possible to set the gennaker.

We had breakfast and lunch and before long we had the British coastline in sight. We navigated around the banks, which years before my father had stranded upon in the fog. The chop became heavier than before as we entered the channel between the banks. We sailed towards the harbour entrance, started the engine and doused the mailsail. We hailed the harbour patrol who gave us permission to enter On genua alone we entered the port and moored in the marine. We set foot on English soil for the first time ever after making the journey on our own keel. What a great feeling this was for the three of us. After calling home to take away the worries of the homefront we headed into town for a well deserved beer.

The town of Lowestoft was a bit of a dissapointment. I hope I don't put anyone reading this down but the ugliest people in the world live there. Unbelievable. We thought the name might be derived from Lowest-of-the-low. But we had a great time in the pub and had a well deserved shower in the yachtclub and a good sleep. We woke at 8pm and checked the weather report. I use the most amazing weather reporting tool called U-Grib (check out the link on the main page of this blog). There were two stormfronts, one circling the northsea near iceland and moving south. The other was near landsend and moving east. Bad news for sailing back home tomorrow. We decided to stay another day in lowestoft so we went to the pub for dinner and drinks. We had a great time in the Lowestoft nightlife and straggled back to our bunks at closing. The next morning, expecting some harsh weater we checkt the weatercharts. To my surprise the northsea front had blown out and the landsend front had stayed near france. This meant there was a nice gap of clear weather between Lowestoft and IJmuiden.

We decided to go for it. We left port and headed for sea. We were immediately sorry. Because of the stormfronts there were very high waves but there was hardly any wind. This meant that there was no means of pinning us in one position and we were lolled back and forth. Last nights beers soon came back to haunt us. The only one stable was Daan who stepped up while Michiel and I were moving from our bunk down below to the rail and back. Not a pretty sight. All in all Daan stood watch for 14 hours before we made it back up on deck.

Through all this rolling and mainly using the engine we were running low on diesel and suddenly the boom came loose from the mastfitting. The rolling had caused the selflocking nut to come undone and we had to go and fix it. Somehow we had very poor AIS reception which we soon found had something to do with us loosing the masthead antenna, also caused by the heavy swaying.

Our final task was trying to sail into IJmuiden because we were so low on fuel we were afraid we wouldn't be able to use the enging trough the locks. We tried to sail for a few hours but there was absolutely no wind at all. It turend out to be the fuelgauge that was the problem because when we enterend IJmuiden Marina and filled her up we could just get around 50 liters back in. There was plenty remaining to get to Muiden and halfway back to Lowestoft if we needed to.

All in all is was a fantastic maiden crossing and we enjoyed allmost every minute of this great adventure. We will certainly do this again next year!

Nick