Goodbye France

By Fi

We spent a few fun days in Cherbourg catching up with new friends and tidying up the boat. We were about to enact our complex plan to get to the UK to save our remaining Schengen visa days, and to get the dog into the UK – you might remember the UK’s very strict rules on dogs entering on private yachts.

Bernie staring at our lovely neighbours who just want to eat their dinner.

We packed all our things, and one very very early morning, left the boat and drove down to Caen and got through the plethora of paperwork to get on the ferry to Portsmouth. Little Bernie had to stay in the hire car, but we enjoyed a little shut eye, some food, some random quiz and some suitably calming live music on the ferry.

We got through the UK customs uneventfully, and we were off to our airbnb in the countryside. About half way there I realised that no one that we encountered in he UK gave two hoots about the dog. I wondered if we were being WAYY too straighty-one-eighty by following all the rules perfectly. Hmmm.

We had 2 weeks in the country. We walked and walked, ran some errands to the swindleries (read chandleries) and set up a few things to make life easier once we were able to get Away in too.

Our trip to the chandleries garnered this lovely encounter in Lymington.

The Quantock hills presented us with some challenging walks, fantastic pubs and a few times, a lost dog. Bernie has discovered squirrels. He’s never seen anything like them before and is absolutely obsessed. He eventually comes back. We also think he has discovered pheasants.

Well, that’s going to need a bath later.

I’m very happy to be walking the hills. My new hiking boots are cutting the mustard too.

Bernie is loving his world and fits right in.

The weather has been magic. Rainy when its okay to, and sunny when we want it to be.

Speechless. They weren’t bothered by us or Bernie at all.

We are also lucky enough to have family and friends everywhere and so we visited Langford near Bristol for a few days to catch up with friends who generously also let us stay in their gorgeous home. Bernie had a great walk on the beach on one occasion and I am living for this face.

Speaking of seeing wonderful people, we were able to catch up with my family as well who are living in London. They came all the way out to Bath to see us and we had a great lunch and look around Bath for a day.

At the pub in Bath. Bernie is suitably well behaved under the table – not.

In the meantime Away was being looked after by the good folk at Garcia and the few warranty issues we had found were being corrected – oh and I should mention we ordered a new room for the boat – its a conservatory! Well, its a set of canvas and clears for the outside area to turn it into essentially an outside room.

Yay our new outside room! Perfect for the cooler weather.

All the work gets done on the boat and it is signed off as good to go, Bernie gets put into a kennel for a few days (much to his dismay, but frankly at this point he can take one for the team), and we head back to France for our overnight stay – which is all we have left on our visa!

Driving on to the ferry at Portsmouth bound for Caen. We have only 2 days left on our European visa!

The Channel crossing is our next challenge in Away. We had timed our trip back so that we would have benign or decent weather to get back to the UK. We were planning to sail from Cherbourg to Portland Marina, which is in the harbour which hosted the sailing events for the London Olympics back in 2012. We’d done a recky on the harbour and felt pretty good about it.

We checked out from France at the cop shop in Cherbourg, managed a last minute French grocery shop (wine) and had an early night ready to leave the next day at sparrows fart (I mean 06:00 sharp).

So at 06:30 we left.

It was sad to leave beautiful France, but alas…

And headed out into the inky blackness, leaving the jewellery box of Cherbourg behind us. There are no crab pots in the dark, so we pointed towards our destination, and come what may, in 10 hours we’d be in the UK.

Adrian caught the photo of the day when the sun started rising.

‘Come what may’ was one of the worlds busiest shipping channels, but we played this video game with life (pictured) that looks like some sort of space invaders, except its real big ships and our relatively little boat… We are the black boat shape pointed north – the big ships are the triangle shaped outlines. We navigated this fine. The ships weren’t interested in chatting to us about navigation, which is okay because being quite introverted, we didn’t want to talk to them either (although we did try to be fair).

This is the first channel of west to east traffic, then further north is the east to west channel.

And the 10 hours turned into 11 hours… and then it turned out we messed up the tides and currents, it’ll be 12 hours.

We get our “Q” flag out at the 12 mile mark so that the UK authorities know we have come from another country and need to be checked in. Is a plain yellow flag that we need to fly on the starboard side. This is the first time we have flown this flag.

Once we are checked into the UK, we fly the red ensign flag as that is the appropriate flag for the UK. When we were in France, we flew the French flag on the starboard side, and as we change to subsequent countries, we will fly their flag. It is part of the rules of being a seafarer to fly the courtesy flag of the country you are sailing in. We fly the Australian flag off the stern as Away is registered in Australia. Sydney in fact – even though it has never been there.

Oh yes back to our passage. Sorry everyone… the 10 – 12 hours will actually be 14 hours of motor sailing and getting in just as the world turned dark because we used the wrong information for the strength of the tide – but we got to Portland! And we have learned some good lessons along the way.