Ten days……

The ten day independent small boat cruise.

Small boat cruising post – September 2022.

In the late spring of 2019 I worked my last shift in the endoscopy unit of our local hospital and less than 24 hours later I tossed my seabag down into the cockpit of my 22 foot centerboard cat ketch, climbed down the greasy ladder onto the boat – my partner handed down a big shopping bag full of fresh food, threw the lines off for me and I backed out of the mud berth dock and into the brisk ebb tide of the Tamar river. It took me a few minutes to get turned around in the tide , I was glad that there were no boats out on the moorings because I made such a pigs ear of the simple maneuver – my excuse being that the tide caught the stern first and that I was rusty from a winter and spring of no sailing – whatever…..I eventually got the little Liberty turned around and pointed the right way……downriver.

That afternoon I didn’t get very far as it was already very cold on the water and the sun wasn’t that far from the horizon, mostly though I needed to sort and stow the food, tidy up my gear and prepare both me and boat for going to sea early in the season – this was early April and I hadn’t sailed since the autumn. Somewhere around Weir Quay I decided that there wasn’t much point in dropping down to my usual anchorage at Sandacre bay so I made a complete mess of picking up an unoccupied mooring not long before the pale sun set and the light but cold northerly wind drove me below to light the charcoal ‘pansy’ stove and set the kettle in the stove top fiddle rail.

Well……I didn’t get much done that evening as the outside temperature quickly dropped below freezing while I was toasty warm in my untidy cabin, in fact it took me all of the next day at anchor in the north eastern corner of Whitsand bay to clean through the cabin and stow everything for my first coastal passage. It was of course the beginning of a huge transition in my own life , from a life of tedious and routine clinical work to one where I would have to structure my own day, every day…….or just drift and vegetate. For those visitors new to my blog I told the story of what happened next in a whole series of posts about my 110 days cruising and living aboard the little Liberty and mostly on the western and southern coasts of Brittany.

In this post I want to re-visit one of the aspects of small boat cruising that I explored during my time at sea that year – that being that I experimented with setting up the boat and my stores in such a way that I could, and did cruise for ten days at a time while being completely independent and self reliant.

The boat……what do we need ?.

At the start of this series of posts I said that I would talk about the boat a lot less and the skills and experiences of small boat cruising a lot more , for reference though my cruising boat at this time was an old Hunter Liberty built in the early 1980’s. The little Liberty was intended as a family dayboat and weekender for inshore and protected waters but certainly not a rugged offshore boat for bashing around in the English channel ; my main reason for buying it being that it would work in the shallow and muddy Tamar , my home river, and be just about capable of making coastal passages in reasonable conditions. Something that this voyage showed me was that the boat wasn’t ideal but good at some things , like for instance poking up a very shallow river or creek, and poor when it came to the outward offshore passage in a lumpy wind against tide or a frisky day in the Raz de Seine.

Today, I would just like to say that i’d spent a lot of time trying to work out what the ‘perfect’ , or at least ideal boat, might be for the combination of offshore and creek sailing, living aboard for extended periods and while still being affordable. Nowadays I don’t think that there is such a thing as a perfect boat – just better or worse compromises – the important thing being that I already had the Liberty and was familiar with it’s quirks. All I needed for this voyage was a small boat with a dry cabin that would have space enough for me all the time and for me and my partner some of the time, to carry enough water, food and stores for independent cruises and then at the end of the day to be able to pull it’s board up and settle on the mud if needs be.

Today I would just like to offer my own opinion on the size and type of boat that can make a viable cruising boat for weeks at a time – solo I happen to think that a boat of around 23 feet can do the job, the Liberty did it for me, but that a couple would benefit from a bit more space and carrying capacity ; our previous boat (Frances 26) was nearly perfect except that it didn’t have the capability of drying out level or making it’s way in very shallow water.

It’s a set up.

In it’s standard form the little Liberty isn’t a comfortable or functional home for several weeks, or in my case months, on the water – something we discovered during our first cruise in the Solent when we took her over. From that day on I started tinkering and modifying the boat until I had something that worked better for me solo and for the times that my partner was on board as well ; first to go was the awkwardly placed galley , moved instead to just inside the companionway and at the same time we took out the sea toilet as both of us found a bucket more functional.

Instead of having 2 narrow settee berths we kept the infills in place permanently which gave us a single large space to sit and sleep and which also created a large storage area under the berth…part of that became our dry food larder and the aft section became my second anchor locker. I built a new galley at the head of the mostly useless ‘coffin’ berth – on passage solo I could reach in and boil a kettle to at least make a hot drink. I altered the former heads compartment to take 2 food crates on the former heads step and shoehorned 3 twenty litre containers for water – those and adding a 60 kg battery under the cockpit sole also re-ballasted the boat and made it noticeably steadier and a better sailing boat.

One of my peculiarities as a sailor is that iv’e always tried to sail a much longer season than most boaters do – the best times for me often being in the spring and autumn when there’s nobody else out there, what that means though is that heat is essential so later on in my tinkering with the Liberty I added a charcoal ‘Pansy’ stove and even had that modified a bit by adding a stainless steel fiddle rail around the top to take my kettle.

There was also a lot of ‘parallel’ development in things like sail handling and anchoring but iv’e covered those in several blog posts – just to say now that one thing a long term cruising boat really needs, and at any size, is absolutely reliable anchors and gear that are easy to deploy and recover ; my anchoring for example I did from the cockpit.

Galley aft next to the companionway and pansy stove where the galley used to be.

The ten day independent cruise idea……what’s that about ?

At heart the whole idea is based around independent for as long as possible and for having as minimal contact with other people as possible at the same time, on the practical side it also derived from my earlier plan to sail around as much of the UK as possible while exploring the many small tidal rivers and creeks while not using any ‘modern’ yachting facilities like marinas for example. I also still had a nagging idea that I really wanted to do a small boat transatlantic voyage and go cruising in the shallow water areas like Chesapeake bay for example and to do that I would need to be able to do a 10 passage to get to the jumping off point and then maybe 21 days to cross the Atlantic.

A good starting point for all of that seemed to be to set up for and complete several independent 10 day cruises ……..one important point, perhaps the most important point, is that I needed to find out if I was happy alone for extended periods – I thought that I would be but needed to find out.

If you’re wondering what that’s all about then i’d just like to explain that iv’e taken the basic psychometric (Big 5) traits test which tells me that i’m statistically an extreme introvert but also a very stable and non volatile/non neurotic personality ; in practice I know that I don’t deal well with being around lots of people but like many introverts find peace and solace in the outdoors. I suspect that many competitive racing sailors are temperamentally quite disagreeable which i’m not (just not very polite) but that many small boat sailors need ‘escape’ from our stupidly busy and over stimulated society – I suspect also that this is or was the basis for what some of the early yachting writers were writing about……Maurice Griffiths and Charles Stock come to mind.

Practical……ten days/small boat and minimal contact with land based services.

In this voyage I didn’t set out to test myself and the boat over say a continuous ten day passage in open water – the longest time I spent actually on passage being around 24 hours cross channel – this series of cruises being more about doing a voyage of day sails and anchoring somewhere quiet at night.

With the boat set up , at the time, as best I could, the simple practical side of the preparation is water, food and fuel, and as a second side of the preparation where to cruise and therefore what charts and publications I would need. By temperament i’m not a great fan of electronics and in preparing for the whole planned Brittany trip I already had most of the charts for northern and western Brittany , a small craft almanac for tides and a useful waypoint directory to help with some of the more difficult approaches. The only other guide I ever kept on board is the late Peter Cumberlidge’s book – ‘Secret anchorages of Brittany’ – which funnily enough I only usually looked at after I was already anchored.

Water.

As iv’e already said earlier one of my boat modifications was to alter and increase my water capacity up to 60 liters in containers that were a very snug fit between the centerboard case and the ‘crate’ step in the former heads compartment – in fact I usually set out with 70 liters plus a full kettle……and often a bucket of fresh water as well but that’s for a different purpose so…..

Iv’e always based my fresh/drinking water carried on allowing for 2 liters per person per day , and that’s with careful use and for example doing the washing up with sea water – in practice during these cruises I found that I was using more than that so iv’e since changed my estimates to 2 and a half liters per person per day plus a reserve. I also now always carry my drinking water in portable containers because on previous trips with my deep keeled Frances 26 and the Deben 4 tonner I found it convenient to just carry a container ashore in a dinghy or walk to a tap if I was alongside a quay.

One small notable event during one of my ten day cruises was that I beached the boat in a small bay one day, walked the short distance ashore and found a tap in a parking lot for camper vans, while I didn’t strictly need more drinking water for that cruise I topped up anyway and had the luxury version of a ‘soogee’ wash that evening.

The sailors soogee wash day : https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2019/07/12/scrub-a-dub/

Food.

Where to start ?……..for the purposes of this post all i’m going to say is that for each ten day cruise I did a main supermarket shop and depending on what kind of supermarket that was I sometimes enhanced that with a visit to the bakery. One main consideration was whether or not I could get blocks of ice at the supermarket although I also worked out that most fresh fish counters at supermarkets will either give it away free or charge a minimal fee for it ; one time when I couldn’t get ice either way I asked at a smaller street supermarket (Camaret I think) and after working out that I meant ice and not ice cream they apologized profusely for not having any but instead offered to freeze bottles of water for me…….that also seems to be custom and practice in some French marinas……

Today though , instead of doing a long food post , which I think deserves a post of it’s own I must mention that my cooking aboard the Liberty was based on an alcohol stove for which I buy meths (methylated spirits) in England but which I couldn’t find anywhere in France at first ; I asked around a bit and found that French supermarkets do sell a similar fuel called alcool brule’ – evidently a form of alcohol which will burn in a stove .

For this post I would just like to add that my food stowage was split between a home made ice-box, built ‘quick and dirty’ from sheets of insulating foam, aluminium tape and gaffa tape, a second crate for dry fresh food and as a ‘day food’ container and then the main heavy larder under the bunk infill…….although we mostly bought and ate fresh food I also kept a store of tins, jars and packets……coffee, biscuits, jams and suchlike.

The infill larder…tins and packets.

Where to cruise for ten days.

I am one of the lucky ones when it comes to small boat cruising , lucky that is because I quite accidentally chose to settle on England’s south west coast, just north of Plymouth at first until we moved to the edge of the Tamar valley where we still live. For several years I kept the little Liberty just downstream of the Tamar railway viaduct and for most of that time was happy to be there and considered it to be the best place that i’d ever kept a boat – everything changed with the pandemic of course and I no longer have that boat although I am building my next and possibly last boat at home in our drive.

In my opinion the south west coast of England is the best cruising ground in the whole of the UK , I admit though that I don’t know the east coast apart from one voyage I started there – I wasn’t much impressed by what I saw. To steal a line from the most famous east coast sailor, writer and designer Maurice Griffiths though the ‘magic’ of the south west isn’t just it’s bold coast and deep blue waters (sometimes) but the series of rivers starting with the Helford river in the west then via the Fal, Truro, Fowey etc to the rivers that pour off rain soaked Dartmoor – the Tamar, Tavy and Plym, the Yealm, Erme and Dart and finally to the Exe…..Exmoor of course, in the east.

Somewhere in our version of small boat cruising heaven will be places to put in, creeks and rivers to hide away and anchor in or challenging tidal coastal passages to sail. The first time, and as I write, the last time, I did a ten day independent cruise was on this coast but……

In the next post I’m going to talk about the actual ten day cruises I did and they were all based on the western and southern coasts of Brittany for which the south west coast of England is a good training ground but Brittany, in my opinion, is perhaps the best small boat cruising ground in the whole world……tell me if you think different.