M.A.R.I.N.

I had never sailed North Sea before. I do remember a ferry trip from UK to France, where a man was so sick he was green, which amused his girlfriend tremendously. So I was surprised of two things; that most of the coastline North of Germany and Holland is quite shallow, with many riffs and even way out to the sea, depths of 8-10 meters, and very far out to reach 20 meters. I had thought that the Baltic Sea was very shallow, but this gave new perspective. Unfortunately the shallowness also meant that waves would be rocking the boat to set a rather projectile tone to the sailing experience of Michael and Nigel. I don’t know where it comes from, but I had no nausea at all and could sleep in my cabin, even though the bigger waves would lift me slightly from the mattrass, and sounds around me were like being in a big washing machine, full of hard objects.

Already the first day was informative with regard to working on board: no reading, typing in this type of weather. More learning to balance and cook tea without hitting your forehead more than twice a day would be the appropriate, embodied research to take place on board. At the same time we would be learning a lot of how to sail this cat using the Raymarine C80 plotter, and connected wind meter and echo sounder. We went to 2-hour watches from the very first day. Except for understanding the lights on ships, most things were relatively OK to handle.

In Borkum we witnessed a celebration of the island’s mini railway on our way to an Internet bar, to get decent weather forecasts and communicado. After a night well slept, we decided that instead of going against the wind towards the Channel, we would sail straight out to England. Off we sailed, with quite many big ships crossing our route yet not from very near.

Catamaran speed was rather slow at start, maybe due to incoming tide. We got the boat moving up to 9.4 knots. On average, we sailed around 7 knots, 6 knots if unlucky.