A Reader’s View

I've had many adventures on the water and every single one of them was highly memorable for one reason or another. I’ve crossed the Tresco Channel between Tresco and St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles in a small 3hp motorboat and got caught in a storm.

As I was the only one of the three of us who had bothered to take a cagoule, the other two seconded me to the prow to protect them from the massive waves crashing over the stern.

Holding on for dear life, with my eyes stinging from sea salt so much I had to clench them shut for almost the entire trip. That four-mile crossing was nothing less than sheer terror.

In stark contrast, I have sailed a 170kg Hobie Cat catamaran across the Bay of Cadiz in the South of Spain and trapezed with a harness attached to the mast. With the cat sailing at a forty-five-degree angle, one hull up in the air, that was a simply amazing experience. The next best thing to flying.

Then there was the time when I took a fishing motorboat out of the River Fowey with my wife and three children. We motored seawards and turned right at the mouth of the river.

A mile or so along the coast I decided to drop anchor about 200 yards from the land. We had our take-out lunch and then decided to haul anchor. As I tried to pull the anchor up by hand, the boat started to list to one side. And that list seemed to be getting worse by the minute.

Eventually, concerned for the well-being of my wife and children, I set off a flare. In the far distance, I could see a sailboat heading towards us. Within less than five minutes the boat pulled alongside and one of our two rescuers asked what the problem was.

I told the guy that the anchor seemed to be caught on something, and with a fast-rising incoming tide, the boat was in danger of tipping us all into the English Channel. As he jumped across onto our boat he suddenly saw the cause of our problem. Fifty yards up from the shore was a brick outbuilding.

“Oh, you know what you’ve done, huh? You’ve got the anchor caught on a Transatlantic telephone cable. That big bugger goes all the way to America! If we can’t free the anchor we’ll have to cut through the rope part, that’s why you have a bloody big knife on board.”

Fortunately, by him tugging on the anchor rope as I shuttled the boat fore and aft, the blessed thing came free. At that point, I decided to head back to the River Fowey before I drowned us all.

As my Spanish surfing instructor once told me, after I darn near killed myself getting caught in yet another storm in the Bay of Cadiz on an ocean-going kyack, “If it’s not dangerous, it’s not fun”. Happy days. What larks.

David Fairweather