The Sieve

Things were looking up.

Our boat was on a ship, and the rest was up to us. This was a very good thing in Peter's view, he being a person with no shortage of confidence in his abilities to fix any possible problem and the absolute determination to do whatever it took to get our new boat where she needed to be.

It was less of a good thing from my point of view, as it put the responsibility for not crashing our new boat squarely on my shoulders. As I may have mentioned in previous entries a few years ago, I'm the designated boat driver of the household. This is primarily because, being small, I'm less well equipped than Peter for leaping on and off pontoons or attempting to haul the entire weight of a boat on my own. All this is perfectly logical, and our time on Jade (our previous boat) has made me a pretty competent driver of 35 foot catamarans. Excessive Penguin, however, is a 50 foot catamaran, and also 20 feet wide, and our plan involved my getting her through a gap maybe 20 and a half feet wide, my very first time driving her. I was the best person for the job, and I knew this, but I really wished I wasn't the best person for the job.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we had to move from our much loved house in Ireland to a small and expensive flat in Emsworth, not far from Southampton, on England's south coast, where the ship was due to arrive. The bright side is that Emsworth, aside from sharing a name with P.G.Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth, is one of the most charming and quintessentially English little towns you could imagine, full of independent shops and cafes, and views like this:

This, incidentally, is the walk Peter now takes every day to get from our flat to the boat

Having settled ourselves in our flat, and made a start on testing each of the restaurants now within walking distance of our home (our new location is very dangerous indeed if you want to maintain sensible eating habits), we set off on a Tuesday around lunchtime for Southampton, where Penguin was waiting for us.

Knowing that she was full of water, and leaking, we arrived an hour early, armed with two large batteries, two heavy duty automatic bilge pumps, one manual bilge pump and a lot of hose (to the bemusement of our taxi driver). Penguin didn't seem to have suffered too much for her Atlantic crossing, except for the unfortunate angle

her bimini (the blue cover you can see in the photo) was now sitting at. Peter hauled the batteries aboard and then began setting up our bilge pumps, so that we could counter the sinking process the moment we hit the water.

'She's been leaking water all the way,' the loadmaster remarked cheerfully. 'We nicknamed her "the sieve".'

'...great,' I told him, and he grinned at me. That didn't sound ominous at all.

Our Caribbean captain had been sure the the only reason she'd got as far as almost sinking was that she'd been waiting so long for the ship to arrive; that the leak was very slow indeed and nothing to worry about for a short trip from Southampton to Emsworth. Our abundance of bilge pumps and batteries was, we thought, a case of massive over-preparation. I was nervous enough already, but not so much about the passage. Now, my thoughts ran to whether the varied collection of flares on board would still work, and if not, in the absence of a life raft or radio, whether people often swam the Solent. I figured I could probably cope with the distance; the difficulty would be in not getting hit by ships (it's times like these when you really need the volume 'How To Avoid Huge Ships').

I wrestled with the bimini, which had lost a couple of bolts holding it in place, to try to make it less inconveniently positioned, while Peter delved into the bilges. Behind us, a monohull was lowered into the water and sailed off serenely.

'You're next!' said the loadmaster.

'What?' Peter poked his head out of the cockpit. 'We're supposed to be offloaded at 2.40. We got here an hour early so we could set up.'

'You're supposed to be offloaded by 2.40.'

'But we've got to set up our bilge pumps - there's three hundred litres of water in her.'

The loadmaster raised his eyebrows. 'Well then, get cracking.'

Peter set about his preparations at double speed, and about ten minutes later we noticed that the crane was hovering around a different catamaran. 'Sorry!' said our friendly loadmaster. 'You were right. That one's next.'

Boats really aren't supposed to do this

Disgruntled, but grateful for the reprieve, we were ready miles before our loading time, and I went and hid on the opposite side of the ship so I didn't have to watch. Something about watching boats moving through the air makes me highly uncomfortable, and I prefer to be out of the way until they've been safely put down again. The parts I did catch weren't exactly comforting. She was swinging from side to side in what seemed like a dangerously uncontrolled fashion, with two members of the ship's crew hanging on to her with yellow lines to limit her movement; if either of them lost their footing, or their grip, she could swing straight into the crane.

But, surprisingly enough, the professional crew who make their living lifting boats in and out of the water managed to get her safely off the ship again.

We were allowed to climb on board, and the bilge pumps were spewing beautiful, diesel-contaminated water into Southampton harbour before we hit the sea.

Then we tried to start the engines. 'Tried' being the operative word. The starboard engine started quickly enough, but the other didn't even make an effort. There wasn't even the exhausted chugging of the starter attempting to fire the engine - nothing happened at all. Diagnosing battery as the most likely cause of the problem, Peter hurriedly swapped the engine over to one of our new batteries, and we tried again. Still nothing.

Well, we couldn't stay sitting by a big orange ship forever. 'I guess we'll have to go under one engine,' Peter said and, with a gulp, I agreed, trying not to think about the prospect of manoeuvring this thing in the dainty Emsworth harbour with a single working engine.

A few hundred yards down the Hamble River, however, it became clear this wasn't going to work. Peter had been hanging out in the hulls, adjusting the bilge pumps to ensure they ridded us of water with the greatest possible efficiency (with the result that we'd almost got rid of it all after only about twenty minutes), and had noticed a fresh, exciting new problem.

'Change of plan,' he told me briskly, emerging from the saloon smelling of diesel. 'We need a mechanic. The starboard engine's leaking coolant.'

Sure enough, the starboard engine's overheating warning alarm kicked in almost immediately. There's nothing like a shrill, impossibly loud ringing in your ears to heighten your sense of urgency. I turned us straight in towards the nearest marina - thankfully this was just to our left - and slowed us down, knowing from experience that engines have a habit of stopping altogether if they start overheating. Peter poured our entire two litre supply of drinking water into the engine, the alarm stopped assaulting our ears, and, crossing our fingers all the way that our remaining engine would keep on chugging, we limped into the marina and docked without crashing (not a given with only one working engine). We'd made it perhaps half a mile from the ship.

Me, hanging out on deck while waiting for the mechanic, looking unreasonably chilled,
probably due to the much-needed Starbucks I'm drinking

The marina, entertainingly, told us that we weren't the first boat from that ship making an emergency stop, and the mechanic we called told us we were the fourth.

We'd hoped that we might still be able to make it to Emsworth that day, but the mechanic couldn't make it to us until half past six, and it quickly became clear that our boat wasn't going anywhere that night. We were there late into the evening while two mechanics cursed at our engines - inexplicably, the port engine, which had refused to start altogether while we were beside the ship, started working spontaneously, while the starboard engine was now the problem - and eventually, once our engines were finally fixed, decided to get a taxi home, collapse for the night, and get the train back early next morning. We pumped out the water that had trickled in while we were sitting at the marina and went home.

The idea was that we'd get some sleep, but lingering stress and nerves resulted in a night spent wakeful and restless for both of us. We left shortly after six the next morning extremely sleep-deprived and wishing only to get the day over with.

It was surprisingly cold, for a sunny day, and progress was painfully slow. We had two engines running - we should have been moving at seven knots - but we felt lucky to make five. We'd expected to reach Emsworth at noon, right at high tide, when we had the greatest possible room for manoeuvre, but at this rate we wouldn't make it at all. Emsworth Yacht Harbour has a sill at its entrance to keep the water in at low tide, meaning that we had maybe two hours after high tide to enter. If we kept up our current rate, we might just make it. Might.

Motoring up the Emsworth channel

As we reached the entrance to Chichester Harbour, we started to feel a little less anxious. Our speed crept up, with less of a current holding us back, and the air grew warmer. We joined a line of boats sailing up towards Emsworth, spotting familiar landmarks and thinking how strange it was to be in a boat again on such a familiar patch of water.

We reached Emsworth Yacht Harbour with minutes to spare, and held our breath as we passed through the extremely narrow entrance, as if it would make our boat slimmer, or shallower. Carefully, and highly conscious of the boats behind us waiting to get in, I steered her towards the nearest pontoon, where the harbourmaster awaited us, and got her safely alongside, breathing a premature sigh of relief.

Peter went up to the bow to talk to the harbourmaster, but from where I was, with engine noise in my ears, I couldn't hear a word. They didn't seem to be securely tying us in place, though.

'What's going on?' I asked when Peter headed back towards me, while the harbourmaster was still standing on the pontoon clutching one of our ropes.

'We're being hauled out now. It's too windy tomorrow,' he explained.

'What?!' I yelped. I was not mentally prepared for this. I thought I'd had another entire day to work up the nerve to try and get this beast of a boat into that tiny little slot.

'We're just letting this boat behind us past and then we'll go. Neil' (the harbourmaster) 'will pull you round this first turn.'

An aerial view of Emsworth Yacht Harbour, annotated to give you an idea of what we were doing. Penguin is about 10 feet longer than the pontoon we were on.

In some ways, it was probably a good thing that I had no notice of the change of plan, as it meant I had no time to agonise about it. With some rope-work and judicious use of both engines, we made it round the tight 90 degree turn, and then began moving through the marina towards the slip for hauling out.

'You'll need to spin her round at the end,' Neil called to me, as we passed him on the pontoon. He mimed a 180 degree turn with two fingers.

I stared at him for a second. 'Are you kidding?' It did seem like a genuine possibility.

'No,' he said, looking none too impressed.

'OK then.' There didn't seem to be any other possible response, but I think the squeak in my voice adequately conveyed my misgivings. Sure, this boat can theoretically spin in her own length, but there was a fair wind by this point and very little space indeed.

I made it safely between the row of moored boats and the island, skirting swiftly to port when someone on a nearby boat yelled that there was a shallow patch up ahead (we'd drawn quite a crowd of onlookers already).

Now came the really fun part. I was planning to use the reasonably sizeable patch of water before the slip to spin the boat, but the wind, and our shallow-patch-avoidance-manoeuvre, had carried us too far to port - if I tried to start spinning our back end would hit the boats we were alongside. On the other hand, I was running out of space; if I went too far forward I'd simply be stuck. The wind kept pushing us further to port, and, I confess, I slightly panicked.

'I really don't think I can do this,' I yelled to Peter, acutely conscious of the row of boat owners to my left, keeping very close watch over the ends of their yachts. I knew this wasn't a good idea.

Just as they're starting to lift her

I'm not entirely sure how, but somehow I did manage to get us turning, our stern skimming the other yachts and missing them by a hair's breadth. When we were approximately facing the right way, I reversed towards the guys perched on the edge of the slip with poles to fend us off and push us in the right direction. We needed more pushing than I'd have liked, and the gap was so tight that we had to pull our fenders out of the way when they caused us to get stuck, but we didn't add any new dents to our boat, which seemed liked a pretty major achievement.

Immediately, the team began setting up; with a falling tide they had no time to lose. I skulked off to feed the cats, mildly mortified having panicked in front of what seemed like half the marina. Later, though, when Peter got home, I felt a little less like I'd humiliated myself when he told me about all the onlookers who'd been expressing their amazement that we'd managed to manoeuvre her in there at all.

And all that really mattered was that she was safely ashore - no need to worry about leaks or engines now! We had months to get her seaworthy, and no immediate concerns but the cockroaches the size of mice that had somehow survived the bug bomb Peter had let off back in Tortola.

Best of all, it was a lovely day.

Safely on the hard. The black bags are a very small fraction of all the crap she had on board that we got rid of.