I officially purchased Klaus- now known as Fear this evening. A friend came with me, and we met the owners on her berth up Fareham Creek. After they showed us where everything was and did their best to give me all the advice I needed they left. For a moment I was too stunned to say anything. I sat down on the bunk next to the chart table and just looked around. What had been an impossible dream, a stupid idea, was now very much a reality and I was sat on her. As usual at first my head filled with doubts and worries, mainly consisting of ‘what the hell am I doing?’, ‘I don’t have enough experience?’ and ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’. But as I looked around, I couldn’t help but smile, this little boat, this space, is going to take me on an extraordinary journey and I’m not even 100% sure what that journey is yet.
We settled in for the night. I had a cup of tea, made dinner and then for the millionth time I checked the passage plan, tides, wind and weather forecast. I fell asleep with the sound of water lapping against the hull. Equal parts excited and terrified about what tomorrow would bring. The last thing I did was make sure the alarm was set for stupid o’clock.
The alarm went off at 4am, I wearily blinked my eyes and in that moment between sleep and awake I forgot where I was and what I was doing. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks and the butterflies in my stomach started dancing. It was 4am and I was meant to be taking my new boat from Fareham creek to Brighton Marina. Bloody hell what was I doing?
I made tea and by 4:30am we were ready and so we decided to slip lines early. My first maneuver was I needed to get her off the berth. Facing the wrong way I either had to reverse out or do a 360. Knowing Albin Vegas are notorious for being tricky in reverse and having spoken to the owners the night before, I decided I would motor off forwards and then turn. I calculated I had enough depth anytime between 4am and 6am. Being within that time range, I went for the maneuver. With a good shove on the bow to spin her out I avoided hitting the boat berthed in front and successfully turned her round so we could face the right direction, down the channel.
The next challenge was there was no electronic navigation equipment. I downloaded Navionics on my phone and plotted my route on that. It was pitch black at this point and as we started off I looked up only to realize we had no nav lights. Good start! We were heading down the channel at an okay speed, but trying to navigate by mobile phone turned out to be trickier than I was expecting. There were so many different red and green lights I was struggling to work out what each light was indicating. I had my crew stand on the bow to help me navigate, acting as an early warning system for if I misjudged anything. It was all going relatively okay, and we were making decent progress when steam started coming out of the inside of the cabin.
FUCK was my first thought. I turned the engine off and I let myself have a moment of panic and frustration. We were relatively safe as with the tide with me I had enough maneuverability to still navigate the channel. Next we needed to solve problems and work out what had gone wrong. Once we drifted for a bit and it had all cooled down, we restarted the engine and checked for water coming out the back. None, okay that meant that currently there was no engine cooling.
We knew what the problem was and now we needed to figure out why. Removing the stairs and opening the engine compartment, the first thing was to check the radiator. The issue was the radiator was right under the cockpit steps, making it incredibly tricky to access especially when the engine is boiling hot. A soaked t-shirt wrapped around an arm later, my crew was able to get the cap off. The radiator was bone dry. Step one was to fill it up, and step two was to figure out why it was dry in the first place. Just in case the radiator hadn’t been full when we started, we filled it up, restarted the engine and waited for the first sign of smoke. 5mins in smoke. Okay that meant the water was disappearing somewhere. With a bit more inspection it turned out that the water pipe had a corroded jubilee-clip on, and the tubing had cracked and dropped off, hence no water cooling. Luckily, we were able to shorten the pipe and re-attach it with cable ties.
In theory that should have fixed the problem. We restarted the engine, and waited for water to come out the back, there was nothing. We waited 5mins in case there was trapped air but still nothing. Turned the engine off and thought. We knew water was going into the engine, but it wasn’t going around the engine to cool it. That meant the impeller must be busted, likelihood was it had melted when there was no engine cooling.
This whole time we had been slowly drifting down from Fareham creek towards Portsmouth harbour. By the time we figured out we needed to change the impeller, we were nearing Gosport marina. Using the engine in small bursts and drifting we managed to reach the marina just as a massive ferry went past. Thank goodness. I would be lying if I said I handled it well, in fact my crew enjoyed pointing out that there had basically been a steady and repeating stream of expletives from the moment the issue started to the point we moored up in Gosport marina. But we survived. Our next issue, change the impeller.
Thankfully we had a spare impeller on board so it should have been a simple job right. Wrong in my rush I had forgotten to pack any tools, and my Leatherman was in my buoyancy aid, which was sitting in the kitchen at home. Bugger. No worries, a teaspoon to the rescue and we managed to get the cover of and check the impeller. It was well and truly buggered. Which at that point was a good thing because it meant we could fix it. Impeller replaced, we restarted the engine and thank God water came out the back, we were good to go. Having left an hour early we still were on track to make the Looe channel around 10am.
We motored out of Portsmouth harbour with no further incidents before crossing the main shipping lane. At that point we decided to get the sails up. With around 12-15knts of breeze and not quite knowing the boat we started with one reef in the main, and a full genoa. Turning head to wind with what felt like an awful lot of effort, the sails were up. Now the bit I had been waiting for, we turned down onto a broad reach, switched the engine off and made way under sail. All the nerves and the stress just melted away. This bit I knew how to do, I was in my happy place. The rest of the journey to Brighton was surprisingly simply. With the tide mostly with us and a good wind, we made Brighton marina in 10 hours doing an average of 4.6kts. Entering and berthing the marina was surprisingly easy and when we were finally tied up alongside, I let out a breath I didn’t know id been holding.
I’d done it, I had completed my first passage on Fear and had done so successfully. Despite being exhausted and shaky I just wanted to turn around and go back to the sea. It was like that first time I went sailing; despite being terrified I had loved it. This was the same even with everything that had happened, I just wanted to do it all again (but maybe without the engine failure next time). The sense of accomplishment I felt in that moment was off the charts. It felt like me and Fear really could do anything.
