Wednesday 29 September 2010

Tom and Alfies day


We started off the day with cereals followed by Sausage and Bacon butties. We then split into groups for one of two activities, dinghy driving around Fleetwood harbour or passage planning with Ian (the skipper). I, Alfie the one typing, went dinghy driving and we had a fantastic time. It was quite comical and occasionally repulsive, especially when Mitchell took the wheel! He was literally petrified he went pale and kept biting his lip! But after 10 minutes he got the hang of it and calmed down at which point his driving improved dramatically. In my time behind the wheel I decided to drive to the fisherman’s end of the harbour. A decision I greatly regret, if this not been made apparent in previous blogs Fleetwood fish dock is rather smelly. As we approached our nostrils were filled with the stench of putrid fish corpses rotting away in thick slimy water. We saw the boats ridden with decay and let’s say quite dirty. When we were told by James that a lot of the fish we eat will come from these boats and/or places like this a lot of people suddenly began to dislike fish. Guess what’s for tea tonight… FISH! After this we had our somewhat mad hour in which we dance madly to Radio 1 in the stern of the boat just before we left. Then we departed for Piel island. We got through the lock in no time and we were out on open sea. A jet boat passed us which literally leapt out of the water at such speeds that we gawked at it for at least 5 minutes. When we got to open water we all decided to go right to the bow when the sea was at its choppiest. We literally were bounced up and then had a pause in which we felt weightless and then we plummeted down and got drenched. A really fun experience, which we were told to stop because the waves were growing in size. At this point I became quite sea sick. We switched off the motor after a while and sailed solely on the winds power with 3 sails without any engines although this began to tip the boat which became a problem for some of us causing Tom Wright to be sick over the side. After 4 hours of sailing we managed to reach Piel island where we couldn’t create lay the anchor as the winch decided to give up but after a lot of elbow grease the skipper and mate managed to fix it (after a lot of fiddling about with the fuse box that is!).
We are hoping that we should manage to get the dinghy over to Piel islands to-morrow. See to-morrows blog for the story!
Tom B and Alfie.

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