Sailing Adventures: Part 6

Continuing west, we left Poole and headed for Portland.

The day started calmly with a north westerly wind blowing up to 8 knots. This is a little light for Escapade, so we motored out of the harbour and turned south towards Old Harry’s Rocks.

The south coast is famous for its white chalk cliffs, especially around Dover, but I hadn’t realised that much of the south coast is also like this. South of Poole are Old Harry Rocks. These are three tall chalk formations, including a stack and a stump. When reading about them, I discovered that these cliffs used to be part of a long stretch of chalk between Purbeck and the Isle of Wight. Over time, large parts of the seam have been eroded away, leaving just the headland seen today.

Why the rocks are called Old Harry’s is uncertain. There are several legends. My favourites are:

– the devil (Old Harry) spent the night there

– local pirate, Harry Paye, used to hide in his ship behind the rocks awaiting passing merchants

– 19th century viking, Earl Harold, was turned into a pillar of chalk after an unsuccessful raid!

We didn’t spot any of them as we motored past, so who knows?

Once past the headland, the wind started to pick up. We started to get Force 4 winds (11-16 knots). So it was out with the Genoa. This was quickly followed by main which made for a lovely sail towards the next headland, Durslton Head.

When sailing, we use our chart plotter rather like you would use a SatNav in a car. We load it with charts (boat word for maps) and we can use it to both plot our intended route and also track the actual route we take. On the photo you can see the chart for the area around Durlston Head. The black line and red dots show our planned route to avoid shallows and turbulent sea around the headland. The pink line shows where we actually went!

As the day progressed, the wind gradually increased – Force 5 (17-21 knots) with gusts up to 25 knots. In order to ensure that we did not overpower the boat, we reefed the main and Genoa (furled them in a bit). We found that with this sail plan, Escapade was still a little unbalanced, so we tried using the smaller staysail as well. Not sure if this was the right thing to do, but it seemed to help!

NB For any sailors reading this, please ignore the sagging Genoa. We tightened it up later!

We dropped anchor in the northern end of the Harbour, just south of Castle Cove. We spent the evening, admiring the view and reflecting on our varied day sailing.