SEAMARK IV is the first of the longer 54-foot versions of the STURIËR 520 series. It was exhibited at the Amsterdam HISWA show in February 2003 and delivered via the UK agents to the ultimate owners in Malta. The first stage of the delivery was from the UK south coast to eastern Spain. A crew of five made this trip, picking up an extra crewmember after Gibraltar. The ship is fitted with two 210 HP PERKINS engines, Hydraulic stabilizers, Simrad autopilot and instruments, Furuno radar/plotter, Transas world folio of charts into a Dell laptop computer. There are four fitted GPS units (two of them Differential) all of them independently powered and wired into the plotters.
THE BEGINNING
We had decided that Friday July 25 was the set day for departure, Initially to Gibraltar then for an extended stop in Eastern Spain but with an ultimate destination of Malta. Tuesday night we had her lifted out to clean the bottom and a last (and first) inspection of the underwater gear. Other than bad scaling of the props and rope cutters all was in order. We managed to get some anti-fouling paint on in spite of protestations from the lift out crew. Wednesday morning we fueled 2400 litres at 28 pence a litre and motored her to Lymington where we would berth until departure. One of our better decisions was to have the welcome and goodbye party on the Wednesday rather than the Thursday night. Of course the Gods that fix such things provide Tuesday night and all day Wednesday with very nice weather but by six in the evening, one hour before the party it started to rain.
First technical remark on the STURIËR 520:It is perfectly feasible to cram 43 people on the ship in pouring rain, provided everyone is lubricated enough (in this case with cheap Spanish wine), to like it real cozy.
The size of the hangovers the next day proves the wisdom of the scheduling decision. Thursday night two of the core crew sleep on the ship and the remaining three crew members are all on board by 8.30 next morning. A slight snag occurs at this moment. The wind is blowing Force 5/6 Southeast, which naturally is where we are going. Further more the forecasts keep talking of nasty depressions either to the west of us, the south of us or the east ofus, whilst the pouring rain suggests the depression might just as well be where we are.
We get loads of advice from the many experts who have come to see us off. Go West! Go South! Stay put! We are tough! We go southwest! Into it! After all we have the tide with us- can’t waste that! Three hours out of harbour, we hear a new forecast on the radio. Full Gale from the Southwest coupled with a stark small ships warning that the sea state will be especially bad given the continuous depressions the previous two days. We have the first crew conference. The compromise decision is let’s go west.
After a while the forecasts are repeated with a note of almost hysteria, and ominously the sea really starts to kick up. This is meant to be fun. Discretion overcomes valour and we turn north again and make for Poole where we find a spot rafted to a large wooden sailing vessel whose crew “certainly would not be mad enough to set out in this kind of weather”.
The sun comes out but the wind blows up so much that even in harbour, we double up on all the ropes. Not a great deal of progress on the first day. We are marginally further North than we started and as much as 15 miles further west! We have a friend who lives in Poole and he provides a serious consolation in the form of copious quantities of (very good) wine and a superb meal. By evening the wind also starts dropping. We arrive back on the ship full of vim vigour courage (and wine). And the wind meter is down to a four.
Five the next morning gets us under way, splashing a bit into the South-west wind but with no problems other than a dodgy windscreen wiper blade. The strategy is to set out for Ushant and then dive into Camaret to await solid weather for the Biscay crossing. The problem is that the forecast keep talking about the really bad weather lasting until near the end of the week. We don’t have that kind of patience and certainly not for staying in France.
We are due Ushant in the middle of the night so going into amaret where none of us have ever been in the dark is in any case a last resort strategy. Brest, which is easier in the dark, is just far too far out of our way (and in France!).
Our navigation gear is good so we decide to go inside Ushant.The computer knows exactly where we are and are going but that pesky light on the far side of the island is confusing the “traditional” navigators. In the beginning it is not at all obvious that it is on the other side of the island and it has no business being there at all, if it is on the inside. Fortunately we trust the technology and after a while all the watch crew is convinced it can be ignored. By now we are nearly past the island and decision time for Camaret has arrived. The sea is perfectly manageable so we press on and by the time the three o’clock watch arrives on deck Camaret is long gone and we are well into Biscay.
BISCAY
All Sunday is fairly uneventful, other than the forecasts, which keep on giving us gale warnings for the area west of 10 degrees west. We are nowhere near that and even our most westerly point off the Portuguese coast (which is still several days off) is at about 9.6 degrees. Close. but not inside the threatened area. Anyway by then we will have lots of agreeable stopping place with Spanish wine. Portugal is to be avoided at all cost because of the bureaucratic hassles. We work flexible hours in the day but from 10 in the evening till ten in the morning we work 3 hours on, three hours off always two men on watch. The daytime weather is not unpleasant and when the dolphins arrive everyone is photographing like mad.
Personally I think these are pretty unimpressive small dolphins. The single shark that shows up is not exactly overwhelming either. But then I am used to South African big fish and they are certainly bigger and in the case of the shark hungrier too. Sunday night and most of Monday all becomes a bit of a blur. We sleep a lot. Eat a lot, tell war stories and read intimidating forecasts for the area west of 10 degrees on the weather fax. I have never had a weather fax before. The theory being that forecasts are useless once you are at sea unless you are prepared to turn around or divert. When you are 200 miles offshore you don’t have many options.
Anyway by Monday afternoon options start to come back. Do we go for La Coruna, go around the corner to Bayona (Vigo) or just stay the course to Gib. The land really looks lovely and blue after a long period at sea. We opt for a fuel stop in Bayona. We get into Bayona by 7.30 Tuesday morning. Straight onto the fuel jetty that opens at 8. It takes an impressive half hour to take on 2200 litres at 70 euro cent per litre. At this stage we have burnt 30.5 litres per hour at a through the water speed of 8.9 knot. We also take on some water but it is already obvious that even with five people on board and two shower units our water endurance capacity well exceeds our fuel endurance, which appears to be 130 hour maximum and certainly 1000 miles with sufficient reserve. We could almost do UK South coast to Gib non-stop if we ran a mean fuel strategy (one engine 8 knots).
PORTUGAL
Two hours later we pull out of Bayona in beautiful calm sunny weather but with a forecast promising force seven northerlies. By afternoon this wind indeed arrives. The waves get really big. You don’t really want to look behind you, they are really intimidating. It is very difficult to judge wave height if you look at trough to peak but I reckon they were certainly taller than the top of our mast which is at nearly 6 metres. But they are so big that the boat just gets picked up on the wave and goes along with it and you just hear the rush of water towards the end of the wave as the ships begins to surf. We are now running constantly between 9 and 11 knot through the water. Should we worry about losing steerage?
It appears not, with the centre-line keel the two smaller “keels” in front of the two massive rudders and the effective “bilge keels” from the stabilizers, we have so much underwater gear driving us forward in a straight line that the vessel never falters and the Simrad auto-pilot never remotely complains. The ship is as steady as a rock and whilst the stabilizers prime function is to handle a beam sea in fact they do a good job reducing the corkscrew effect. So again all day Tuesday and Wednesday we plough on down the Portuguese coast. We see some land at Capes occasionally but the shortest route tales you well offshore and it seems to go on forever.
I guess you mentally prepare yourself for the long haul across Biscay and once you have seen Spain “you are nearly there” The long stretch down the coast then becomes very long indeed. Furthermore we are now getting close to the 10 degrees west point where the gales (and for all we know dragons as well) appear. We also now get the “Mario” phenomena. Mario appears the call sign for Pakistani crews to bait Phillipino radio crew into replying when unspeakably foul abuse is hurled across and unmentionable sex acts are planned. All on channel 16. We are just off the big ship track down the coast so we get this for hours on end between one and four in the morning. We have this traffic on successive nights down the coast and then again right into Bay of Cadiz and later as far as Cabo the Gata on the Spanish South East.
It cannot be the same ship as they are not going to be at a nine knot cruising speed and have the same layovers as we have in Southern Spain. Officers must sleep that time of morning. Cabo San Vincente is the Southwest corner of the Peninsula. We have had dire foretelling from some of our crew on the sea state there but in practice it is a beautiful Wednesday evening when we round Some of the cliff face is so steep that they fish with ordinary rods of the top. I should think a good hundred metres high.
As night arrives we start the long trek across the bay of Cadiz towards Tarifa and Gibraltar. By morning the Easter wind has blown up considerably and the forecasts are talking about 5 occasional 6 on the nose. Not nice but manageable. By lunchtime the wind continues to pipe up and then suddenly comes the forecast of full gales through the Straights. We had been warnedagainst this sort of thing and it would be our bad luck to actually experience it. The boat starts to slam a bit and we slow to reduce the impacts of the hits. What alternatives? The computer showed 37 miles back to Jerez and 32 miles forward to Tarifa.
Others have also heard the forecast and we hear an anxious Englishman in a 44 foot sailboat calling Tarifa asking about wind and sea conditions. We are appropriately outraged at their lack of seamanship in hearing them ask the operator if they would be OK going into the Straights. He correctly points out that this judgment is the master’s responsibility. I am not sure people like that should be allowed out of the Solent. We presume they have turned back. We hear a couple of other vessels on the radio agreeing between them to turn back. Do they know something we don’t or are we just braver (or more foolhardy)? The problem is that the forecasts for the next few days are no different.
Whatever we have to do going back to Jerez (a good 4 hours after all) would have to be painfully regained into a head sea. We have tried going closer to land to reduce the effect of the current a bit but that seemed to do little. One of our team totally against accepted wisdom has tried speeding up and Lo and Behold it works! At 10 knot the STURIER seems to cut though some of the waves rather than climb them, subsequently to fall down into the trough with a crash. The only negative consequence of the speed strategy being that we are now practically a submarine and visibility is reduced to a half second at a time as the wipers clear just momentarily. Also the heat becomes pretty fierce, as everything has to be kept shut.
We have the air-conditioning on full in the wheelhouse only and that keeps it bearable but the reflected glare of the foam is like mirrors being aimed at the eyes. The wind is in the high thirties (knots) but gusts take it over 40 occasionally. We have the radar on because our visibility is so limited, but that produces beautiful color images of the water spray on the screen. Longer range is better. We are now tuned to Tarifa traffic control and marvel at the Spanish operators patience with vessels, which seem not to have the slightest idea about traffic lane discipline. We also listen in to an American warship calling repeatedly to a cargo vessel determined to achieve an incident. It ultimately turns out to be a Pakistan crew maybe it was the man calling for “Mario”.
As we get closer to Tarifa sea conditions improve somewhat. We had planned arrival at more or less slack water conditions, which should have helped, but the wind itself also seems to have dropped. As we pass Tarifa the sea flattens out remarkably. Tarifa certainly “commands” the Straights. Far more so than Gibraltar, which is really well away from the actual “choke point” of the entrance into the Med. Remarkably, suddenly we have a glassy calm sea and we open a bottle of wine to celebrate arrival in the Med. We navigate our way around all the anchored ships in the bay. These will come back to haunt us later, but now it is all plain sailing to the customs house where we undergo good old fashioned formalities (yellow flag and all).
The fuel jetty has a line of six boats so we go for the marina, which is some way back. We must have drunk the largest gin and tonics around in one-litre beer glasses. The steaks were great, the only problem being that the restaurant “rolled ” as if in a bad sea. It just would not stand still. When we go to bed there is a full moon and perhaps somewhat ominously high humidity and not a breath of air. For the first time in a week we get to sleep standing still.
THE MED
Next morning we have real fog. Not a bit of mistiness. The real thing. We cannot see the marina entrance some 50 metres away. We also have an appointment to pick up our last crew member in Estepona at around mid day and to top it we have not yet managed to find a berth for the following night on the Spanish South coast. Estepona certainly could not take us but we could pick up our passenger at their fuel jetty. By nine the fog has improved to being able to see the marina exit and we decided to risk motoring up to the fuel jetty. We have very good small-scale electronic harbour charts and the Furuno radar has an overlay facility where you can put the radar on top of the chart. Even so we have hair-raising problems getting out of the inner harbour.
The problem is that you dare not go faster then engine idle speed as you cannot see the harbour wall which is 30/40 metres parallel to you and at that point you have almost no steerage. Once in slightly more open area we manage OK and make the fuel pumps where we are sold 2000 litres of what I considered seriously overpriced “duty free” diesel at 34 pence a litre. More expensive than in the UK. Afterwards we were told this was not duty free at all but effectively the same as road fuel and that they do this to placate the Spanish. I cannot come away from Gib with a single positive thing to say. Yes in Spain the duty paid fuel is 70 cents a litre but at least the price is straightforward and the food is better. The sooner the Spanish take over Gibraltar the better.
The trip out through the Bay is nightmarish. You hear the foghorns all around you. You see them on the radar. But under pressure it is not at all clear whether they are moving or anchored. Every now and then you just see this massive bulk looming up out of the fog practically on top of you. In practice nothing other than a single tugboat and us actually moved. They were all anchored but that is not nearly as obvious at the time as it is with hindsight. Certainly in some 15 years of quite adventurous sailing and boating in difficult North Sea and English Channel waters this was the scariest thing I have done.and that is in waters without tides or waves! We are confident that around Europa point the fog would lift. Only the fog itself does not know that. It stays as thick as ever and as you move into more open water your judgment of how far your visibility stretches disappears.
The only reference is the man we have placed on the bow of the boat. That is with some of the best radar kit in the amateur business. Of course half the Spanish fishing fleet has to be out on maneuvers and whatever direction they go in, it is always directly at you. In this respect they are no different to Dutch and English fishermen. And like their Northern brothers as soon as you change course to avoid them they themselves turn directly to you. If we had known how difficult it was going to be, we would never have left the berth much as though we would have disliked a further night in Gibraltar.
We phone our friend who is by now waiting in Estepona marina. He has managed to negotiate a berth for us on the basis of the berthing master believing that the likelihood of us actually finding the marina and using it was near zero and that we would just choose to carry on out on the open sea where there was room. On the other hand none of the other booked ships were going to get there so overbooking to compensate for the no-shows was reasonable. Here the radar/chart overlay coupled with the very good Transas charts on the computer did their job brilliantly. We saw the harbour wall for the first time at no more than three ship lengths and when we tied up in the berth the accuracy of the chart and diff GPS confirmed that we were always accurate to within 1 metre. It is no good having a very accurate GPS.
You have to have that combined with faultless charts. Certainly both Transas and C-map were spot on even in the harbour. Copious volumes of Gin and Tonic and Spanish red wine were sacrificed to pac ify the anger of the Gods that make fog that day. All the same it appeared not to be enough and at four the next morning it lays as thick as ever. However, at twenty past four I observe a tiny ripple of wind on the totally flat water in the harbour, and believe me at 4.30 it is as if there had never been any fog at all. It went.and so did we!
The rest is uneventful. Other than Mario returning again. Now we have an Urdu speaker on board who can translate some of the stuff as well. The Easterly wind has returned on the last 30 miles before the eastern corner of Spain, Cabo de Gata and we are back to splashing again. The ongoing downward current on the east coast as you go north again is a bit frustrating. We now follow the coast and whilst that is breaking the monotony, the degree to which the Mar Menor has been built up since last time I had passed this way is staggering and awful.
Conclusion: The computer showed that including switch-on times in the harbours, idling, etc. etc. we had done over 1600 miles at exactly nine knot average and a fuel consumption of 29.4 litres per hour. We took just over nine days from Poole to Denia, including 57 hours in harbour tied up. Just about a full seven days of motoring. We had high wind conditions at least three times (twice at gale levels) We had the worst fog any of us had ever experienced.
Nothing broke on the STURIËR and we used one litre of oil. You could have done it in a sailboat but not in the time we did it. You could in no circumstances have done it in the average polyester planing boat. Nor for that matter could a semi displacement boat have handled the following seas off the Portuguese coast. And when I see the Fairline and Princess brigade imperiously sweeping past me on the way to their anchoring spot some 10 miles away from harbour I know that they burn fuel at a rate pleasing to Opec. That tortoise did end up beating the hare you know!
Story by Sipko