St Helier towards Alderney

The alarm went at 1 am, and Julian got dressed. I didn’t, waiting until I heard movement. Nobody stirred until 01:45 and when I stuck my head out an apologetic Frenchman said he had discovered there was no room inside, so they were staying put. I told him we intended to be off at 05:00, and asked him to excuse our feet on his deck, since most of our lines were made off on his cleats.
I woke at first light, wondered what time it was, and checked. 05:11! The alarm had failed. Julian was up instantly, and by the time I had my clothes on Robinetta was motoring away from the raft of boats. It turned out the skipper had been waiting since 5 to help us with the lines....

We zig-zaged slowly down towards the harbour mouth, preparing as we went, and by 05:30 we were clear of the inner harbour. We got the main sail up in the outer harbour then set off towards the Northwest Passage. A passenger ferry came in past us when we were only just clear of the outer harbour, but there was plenty of room.

The wind was almost directly on the nose, but we had the tide with us (the reason for leaving so early). This resulted in quite large overfalls, that we could not get through under engine alone, so we tacked, with engine on. I am not sure I approve of a buoyed entrance channel with such bad overfalls in it! We tried going inshore to avoid them, but the island has plenty of outlying rocks, so we had to keep tacking away, back into the overfalls.

Once we were past the Passage Rock cardinal we were clear of the overfalls, and could turn onto a better heading for sailing. The engine went off for a while, but came on again to help us power through the next set of overfalls, off La Corbiere lighhouse. We only needed it for a few minutes, then we had a lovely sail up the north coast of Jersey towards Sark.

The tide turned foul for us just after 10:00 and progress under sail became very slow There was no point arriving at the Alderney race until 15:00 as we would make no progress against it, but we had to put the engine on as the wind had also got very light. We tried using George, but the swell was too much for him after an hour, so we went back to hand steering. Luckily the wind also picked back up and we managed to sail our course in the afternoon.

Despite much searching of tidal diamonds on the chart plotter, which implied we would not get fair tide until 16:00, the CA almanack tidal stream diagrams proved reliable and we began to pick up speed at 15:00. We entered the Alderney Race exactly on time, and were suddenly being overhauled by a fleet of yachts coming from Guernsey and Sark and heading up channel; none of them followed us in our turn towards Bray.

There were overfalls building off Race Rock, but we got through them without trouble, although we were too early on the tide for the back eddy towards Bray, and the last 2 miles became a slog under motor to get to Bray. As we entered harbour 4 yachts appeared from the north, sailing/motoring through the overfalls at the end of the harbour wall.

We played “hunt the vacant mooring” with the other newly arrived boats, but in vain. All were taken.

We motored over to the anchorage and had a good look round. In the end it took three goes to get the anchor down and holding in a good spot. Not what we wanted at the end of a long day’s sail. It was Julian’s turn to drop the anchor and at the end he admitted he was too tired to go ashore, despite the convenient water taxi so we ate on board, our boat standby of chorizo and tomato sauce with pasta.

The anchorage did not feel very sheltered; all the boats, including those on moorings, were rolling in the swell. Julian and I decided not to get the bed out, but to sleep long ways in the bunks as it would be more comfortable. Even so I woke every hour. Worm kept knocking into us, and I wanted to check our position relative to the other anchored boats and make sure the anchor was holding. It began to drizzle at 1 a.m, and by 5 it was raining. Not a good night’s sleep by any means!