Thursday, 13 August 2015

Passage to Le Havre

A fine collection of veterans
This morning we looked round the centre of Dieppe, did some shopping and saw a rally of about a dozen veteran cars. One had the date of 1911 on it and the rest seemed of similar age.All great fun with much smoke, noise and a powerful aroma of hot oil and unburnt petrol. They left with much sounding of horns and good wishes from the many spectators.

We left Dieppe at about midday and found a brisk NE wind which raised a marked swell in the harbour entrance. We had intended to go to Fecamp, about 28 miles along the coast but by the time we were off the harbour the wind had strengthened to force 6-7. The old boat had been rolling along in fine style at pretty much her maximum hull speed so we had reached Fecamp rather earlier than expected: it was low water and I thought that there could be a difficult swell on the entrance bar, which only has around 1m over it at LW springs. 

Rather than wait off for the tide to rise we decided it would be more sensible to press on to Le Havre, an extra 20 or so miles but a harbour that its possible to enter safely at any time. We had a wild sail with Bonita surfing down the heavy following seas. At times we were logging over 10 knots while Alice was steering, an unbroken record for the day. Bonita took it all in her stride and got us safely into Le Havre shortly after dark. 

We had supper aboard. One of life's great pleasures is being comfortable and secure onboard a boat in a safe harbour while its blowing hard outside.

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