The Wild West

In the last of our series celebrating coastal ports and places around Britain and Ireland, Yacht Nova sails through the fierce tides of the Bristol Channel, visits Lundy Island, and gets help from the coastguard to deal with a medical emergency

- JONATHAN WINTER

When exactly will you arrive?” It’s a question that made us smile, given the variables of British weather and tides. We tried not to promise any of our crew exactly where we would be, and when. But people do need to make a plan.

Rashly, before our departure we had therefore circulated a detailed itinerary of our entire voyage, with dates and locations getting gradually more vague. Relying on this, my cousin from New Zealand had booked her flights to join us in Milford, together with Dai, a friend whose Welsh roots drew him back. They both needed to leave us in Bristol a few days later. Now, we had to deliver.

It’s hard to explain to non-sailors how long it takes to prepare a single day’s sailing. Most days, Anne, as chief navigator, spent up to two hours of passage planning and research the old-fashioned way with tide tables and pilot books. For the Irish Sea and St George’s Channel, that included my grandfather’s 1962 tidal stream atlas (above); the moon, after all, hasn’t shifted much in half a century. Then we went through the plan together and I cross-checked with tidal information on an iPad, double and triple-checking the timings and guidance for each port and discussing back-up plans. Finally I entered waypoints on the iPad and transferred them to the plotter. It was exhausting, especially at the end of a long day’s sailing.