Storms At Sea, Guns and Amsterdam.............

When we had bought Mojo (This is the Swahili diminutive form of the name of one of Rod's daughters, Josephine. She was called Josephine, and in Swahili, if you add an “m” to the front of a word it becomes the diminutive). We had planned to sail her to Australia one day. You can't accuse us of unambitious dreams can you?

So this seemed like a good moment to put that plan into action, and we thought a good start would be to sail her down to Spain or Portugal to start with, and then later onwards to Australia via anywhere we felt like looking at en route.

Nautical tony boarding Mjojo

So off we set in Mjojo from Portsmouth with a crew made up of my brother, sister and her husband (I think they were married at that point) on our way to Spain, we thought.

Things went wrong almost at once, a huge storm that had not been forecast hit us almost as soon as we had cleared the Isle of White, and we found ourselves dealing with waves taller than the ship's mast and a totally chaotic situation... Luckily Mjojo is a highly sea-worthy ship, so she seemed unperturbed by all that watery violence... We on the other hand were rather less sea-worthy and were decidedly perturbed by the violent weather.

It was actually very frightening to be honest... the waves were gigantic and even though Mjojo was taking it all in her stride perfectly well, our crew were less able to cope... Most being violently sea sick.

We had no choice but to run with the wind, so we were sort of surfing up and down those ridiculously big waves, pitching and rolling all over the place.

I can still remember being below decks trying to cook some soup for us to eat – well for those of us who were in any state to eat. The cooker was gimbled, which means that it could swing from left to right when the ship rolled about, and I found myself stirring away at the pot as it swung through about 90 degrees.. Strange to see the soup was not slopping around as the pot swung back and forth.. .and I simply had to stir upwards and downwards as it did this... rather funny in fact.

Generally when you get this sort of weather, a sensible sailor stays as far from land as possible.... The sea is not really dangerous, but being near the shore is very dangerous. So we steadily rode the storm and sort of slid across the Chanel towards France.

Being in a boat at sea in a storm in sight of land is rather like being in a space ship in orbit around the earth, you can see the countries, but you can't go there.... A very lonely feeling in fact.

So in due time we found ourselves beating parallel with the coast of France, and when we were up on top of the waves we could see the lights of towns there... But couldn’t go there... nasty feeling.

As we neared Dieppe, we suddenly saw a whole flotilla of fishing boats coming out in line..... So we thought that perhaps it might be possible to get into Dieppe harbour, and thus escape the rest of the storm...

At this point only Lotty an I were capable of working, the rest of our doughty crew were either as sick as dogs, or sound asleep below decks....

So Lotty and I decided to give it a go, and lined up the approach lights to the harbour and started to make our way towards the entrance to the harbour. This meant sailing at 90 degrees to the wind … so instead of riding cheerfully up and down the waves in the same direction as they were going in, which was actually reasonably peaceful to do, we were now rolling wildly from side to side as we slid sideways up those absurdly huge waves, and at the top sort of flipping over by about 180 degrees, and sliding down the other side of the wave as it went away from us. Remarkably exciting thing to do I can tell you. Better than any fair ground ride invented yet.

So, rollicking like a pig in a bucket, we steadily headed shorewards and managed to slip into the mouth of the harbour, where suddenly all the wave action stopped, and we were sailing calmly into the harbour. A most extraordinary feeling.

So we tied up, made ourselves a hot meal, and then went to bed...

The next morning we went onto the beach beside the harbour wall and looked out at the still raging storm, and saw how narrow the harbour entrance was.. about four times the width of Mjojo, and realised how lucky we had been to actually manage to get into the harbour, and also saw that if we had missed the entrance we would have been on the beach on a matter of minutes, with no hope of escaping total disaster.... But we had managed, so all was well... But it was still bad seamanship to try and get in ..

Unfortunately the storm continued for several days, which mucked up our plans a lot, as our crew didn’t have time to finish that leg of the voyage, so we decided to change our plans and sail to the Netherlands instead, and continue the trip the following year from there. Also the winds were still strong and blowing from the South East, so no use to us.

So we set off towards The Netherlands in good spirits and rather calmer weather.

This section of the trip produced an interesting comparison between the attitudes of France, Belgium and the Netherlands towards guns. As was common in those days, we had a 9mm automatic pistol with us (completely legal) to be used to fend off pirates and other nasties. At that point there was a spate of Breton fishing boats ramming pleasure crafts as they thought those pleasure craft were interfering with their work, and further south pirates were active as well. So I felt that if a crazy Breton came at us, a couple of bullets from my pistol into the bows might make him think again.

Anyway, when we arrived in Dieppe, I dutifully reported my pistol to the police, who were not bothered, and assured me that provided I didn't take it off the boat, I was at perfect liberty to use it should anyone attempt to board her with a view to stealing things. A few days later, in Belgium I reported the pistol to the cops, who obviously thought I was mad bothering to tell them about it, and told me that I was allowed to wander around on shore with the pistol, provided I didn't wear it too obviously, and anyhow, had a perfect right to defend myself. They neglected to define who I could protect myself from though.

On arrival in Holland, I mentioned to the Dutch border police who came onboard to deal with our arrival, the reaction was very different. Horror, fear and alarm best characterized the reaction. And they asked me to show it to them, which I was perfectly happy to do. When I produced it, one of them took it from me, only using the tips of his fingers, looking as if he was scared it would go off and kill him. An odd reaction I felt as it was exactly the same model pistol as the one he was wearing on his belt. Anyhow, they confiscated it, and told me that I could get it back when I left the Netherlands..

Many years later when we finally left the Netherlands I didn't bother to try and get it back.

So anyway, we sailed off toward the Netherlands, and a very pleasant and uneventful trip it turned out to be, apart from when we arrived at the mouth of the very broad river Schelde, and only had about 20 km to go before we arrived at Vlissingen harbour (what the Brits with a remarkable lack of imagination call Flushing) we discovered that we didn't have enough diesel to get up river under motor power and into the harbour. So we used our VHF radio and asked a nearby freighter if they could spare us about 20 litres of diesel, which they agreed to do. So we chugged on our last few litres of diesel over to get near them, put out our inflatable into the water and went to them to finish the deal.... Cost us a bottle of duty free whiskey, which was OK as none of us like whiskey...

So, with that diesel we drove off and into Vlissingen harbour, tied up and relaxed.

The following day our crew returned via ferry to Britain, and we set off on the canals up to Amsterdam where we planned to spend the winter...

This was a bit nerve wracking as Mjojo's engine and propeller were really nothing like big enough for her – she weighed 27 tons, and had a very deep and long keel, about 2.4 meters deep and almost 40 feet long. So stopping in the locks and so on was tricky, especially as there was often a remarkably strong current running about 2 meters below the surface of the canals, which grabbed Mjojo and pulled her along, not easy or fun. She is after all a vessel designed for the open sea, not for canals.

Anyhow, after several days of this, we finally arrived in Amsterdam, tied up to a tree at the end of the Haarlemerstraat, and I went for a walk along the Haarlemerstraat, and was amazed by the fact that I could in no way even make out the individual words of the people around me talking in Dutch.. It was simply a long stream of guttural noises to me.

Some time later, a Dutch friend of ours told us that in fact Dutch is not a language, but a throat disease.... Not kind. It is actually a remarkably precise and useful language as we discovered in due time, but in the beginning it was a good description of how it sounded to us.

We only stayed there for a couple of hours before someone came along and told us it was forbidden to tie up to trees reasonably enough, so we went off and found a mooring in a yacht harbour on the north side of the Ij, called Sixhaven, where we stayed for about a year.

And there we were, leg one of our Round The World Trip finished, and we set out to have a pleasant winter there in that most lovely of cities.

Little did we know that it would be about 20 something years before we went on the next part of our travels..... But that begins in the next installment of this tale....