I have been cruising in my Drascombe Lugger for several years now with, in general, not too many incidents, although a certain amount of excitement and getting to where I wanted to go — generally speaking.

This year the pattern was rather different, and I thought my experiences might be of interest and even, possibly, of amusement to others.

Fairly early on in the summer I decided to take three days holiday to coincide with the half term of one of my children, and to cruise from Poole to the Solent and back. So late one Sunday afternoon David, aged 16, and I set off from Poole for Christchurch. There was very little wind, so, after a bit, we started motoring. All went comparatively smoothly until we reached Hengistbury Head.

I felt it would be good experience for my son David to con us into Christchurch. I had only been in once before myself but the entrance had seemed to be very simple and it was a fine evening, with calm weather. I had a quick look at the pilot book which had a comforting sentence ‘there are no off-shore dangers’, and handed responsibility over to David. He looked at the chart, asked me one question about a line on it, and then carried on more or less as we were. As it was starting to get dark, and the wind had completely dropped we were under engine and going fairly fast. About five minutes later there was a horrible grinding crunch and it was painfully obvious that we had hit something submerged very hard. We turned off the engine and found ourselves on a rock where our rudder, which projects below the keel, seemed to be fairly firmly fixed. The rock was a fairly narrow one, because part of the boat was over deep water. In a true spirit of generosity, I sent David over the side to try and heave us off and he tried to do it, but was unsuccessful. As I was aware that the tide was still dropping I then felt it necessary to sacrifice myself as well. I therefore stripped down to my pants and boots and joined David over the side. By dint of bodily lifting the boat we finally managed to get it off the rock and floating in deep water. We struggled back aboard to view the position, but it was by now dark, we were both soaking wet and in getting back into the boat, we had tended to soak some of the clothes we had taken off, and it was soon pretty clear that the rudder was fairly badly damaged. It would no longer retract and would only turn to a minimal extent. We decided, nevertheless, to carry on for Christchurch; we re-started the engine and set off. A few moments later I suddenly saw my trousers, which were lying on the side benches, disappearing over the side through some unseen mechanism. What had happened to them, I didn’t know, but over they went. By the time we had swung round to go back for them they had sunk in what was fairly deep water and it was dark. The trousers had in them, apart from other things, my glasses, sailing knife and money. However, there was nothing that could be done about it, and we set off again for the Christchurch entrance. At this stage I had taken over the navigation. By now, however, the problem was that the tide was very low and still going down a bit and as we could not retract our rudder, our total depth was about 2’ 6” instead of the 1’ that I had banked on. We grounded two or three times way out in the channel and it quickly became clear that we were only going to get into Christchurch by waiting a long while for the tide to drop and come up again.

In the circumstances, rightly or wrongly, and it was now 11 o’clock at night, I decided to go on to Lymington. We had some charts on board, but unfortunately I could not read them without my glasses which had gone down with my trousers and I was not prepared, in view of my recent experiences, to trust David’s reading of the charts too much. We therefore proceeded by following the lights of the shore. In practice this was accurate enough as far as Hurst Narrows though it got very dark when the moon went behind the clouds and we could not see the shore itself. It was also very difficult to decide which navigation light was which, particularly as I had not actually sailed in this direction in the dark, having previously only sailed from the Solent back to Poole in the dark. The Needles Light looked very close, although it must have been 5 miles away. Eventually, however, we arrived at Lymington at about one o’clock in the morning. I was wearing trousers again by then as I had dug out my spare pair and we got out our sleeping, bags. We did not try to put the tent cover on; we just got out our survival bags, put the sleeping bags in these and lay down on the floor boards and slept under the stars. We slept very well.

The following morning we had to dismantle the rudder and tiller. I sent David below the boat to tie a line to it, dropped the rudder down through the transom and took it ashore for mending (the Berthon Yacht Company could not have been more helpful) and I then had to go off to buy a magnifying glass so that I could read the charts for the rest of the trip!

My first attempt at the trip back from the Solent was unsuccessful. I was leaving from Beaulieu with a westerly force 4 to 5 wind and the tide running against me. As soon as I came out of the shelter of Beaulieu River it became very rough with continual spray and I found that even under jib, mizzen and reefed mainsail together with the Seagull outboard I was not able to make up against the tide. I anchored at one time to tidy up the boat which had got in a bit of a mess with all the motion and even at anchor the spray was coming over to quite an extent. This was 5 o’clock in the afternoon and I decided these were not the conditions to sail solo through the evening and part of the night across to Poole so I went back into the Beaulieu River and found that the first part of the river, since the water was covering the bank, was extremely rough and I was only just able to creep up against it with all sails furled and the engine at full revs. It was surprising how rough that first bit of the Beaulieu River could be.

It has always been one of my ambitions to sail across the Channel and I decided to try and do it this summer. Last summer I had sailed my Drascombe Lugger down to Dartmouth from Poole which was, in fact, slightly further than from Poole to Cherbourg, and I saw no basic reason why one could not get to Cherbourg. I did all the usual planning and, specifically, because I was in an open boat I did a special map of the lights I was likely to come across on cardboard which I then covered with clear Fablon.

My plan was to set off with my three youngest children aged 18, 16 and 14 one morning about 11 o’clock so that we would be nearing Cherbourg in the dark, be able to position ourselves by the lights, and enter, hopefully, shortly after daybreak. Apart from an attack of cold feet by one of the children just before setting out, and considerable worry by their mother as to whether she would ever see them again, we did, actually, for a change, get to the boat almost on time and were ready to go at 11 o’clock.

The forecast was for westerly force 3 to 4 and not increasing beyond 4 for, at any rate, 24 hours. We set off in much lighter winds than this and had a fairly calm passage until we were clear of St. Albans Head. No longer being in the lee of the land we started to get the full force of the wind and from then on we were taking a certain amount of spray the whole time. One of the results of this spray was that it was fairly difficult to do any proper navigation since the chinagraph marks on the plastic covered chart got washed off whenever a dollop of spray came over, so one had to memorise one’s position rather than rely on being able to see it on the chart.

At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon our radar reflector came loose. The reflector was carried on an L-shaped piece of wood which was then attached to the mizzen mast and two side lines carried to the side of the boat to stop it swinging laterally. The cross piece holding the radar reflector broke, presumably through continual movement in what were by now fairly choppy seas, and we had to take the mizzen mast down to disentangle it. At this stage we were being passed at a distance of about half a mile by a Truck Line container ship on its way to Cherbourg and I am glad to recall that she slowed down and very nearly stopped while we were taking our mizzen mast down and did not continue until she saw us put the mast back up again and carry on. While we were not in any form of trouble I would like to thank the skipper for his courtesy, if he reads this. It was a comfort to see him slow down.

By about 5 o’clock England was beginning to disappear below the horizon and we did our last bit of accurate navigation by bearings. At about this time I was starting to get a certain amount of problems from seasickness, one of my children was feeling very sick and another not feeling at all well. We were all also fairly damp by now in view of the continual spray. At five to six I listened to the weather forecast on the wireless which was then forecasting the wind to swing into the SW and increase to force 5. It unfortunately did not give the time when this change was likely to happen. By now I had two seasick children and a third one not feeling very well and a weather forecast that was worsening in a boat that is not particularly fast or close winded. It was a difficult decision to take, but I felt that to carry on with three seasick children, into a rising and heading wind, with night coming on, and with a shipping lane yet to cross, to make a landfall on a coast I had never seen before, was possibly unwise. If a child had been available to help me I would have carried on, but to continue effectively single handed under these conditions with the responsibility for three children seemed wrong, and we turned round.

We must have steered a fairly accurate compass course on the reciprocal because we passed various bits of flotsam that we had seen on the way out an hour or so earlier. There were no particular problems coming back other than the rising wind. We had some difficulty in lighting one of the oil lamps and I can remember having an argument with my middle daughter when she dropped the lighter we were trying to light the lamps with as we were hunched over the lamp in the bows to shield it from the spray and the wind.

We got back to the entrance of Poole harbour at about midnight and tried to phone my mother who lives there, but could not get any reply (it later turned out the telephone was out of order). We therefore carried on round the harbour to our mooring, and slept on board in sleeping bags and under emergency blankets, having first had to strip off all our soaking wet clothes before going to bed.

An exhausting day, frustrating, in that we did not make our destination but I think in the circumstances the right decision; but it won’t stop us having another shot at it.