To circumnavigate Scilly
Isles of Scilly

by Sam Llewellyn

The sky is getting light. The kettle is shrieking. The shipping forecast is saying, Sole NW 2 to 3, backing SW later. Lucille is in the northeast of Sole, off the village of New Grimsby, between the islands of Tresco and Bryher in the Isles of Scilly. Swig the coffee. Peel back the tent flap. And there it is, the sickle sweep of the bay, the granite quay, the smoke of an early Rayburn coming back down the breeze. A curlew is yodelling on the sand flats, no doubt catching the worm. The world comes into focus, and so does a certain nervousness. The plan is to circumnavigate Scilly.

Scilly consists of small crumbs of rock half-submerged in large quantities of Atlantic. It is a challenging spot for open boat sailing. It is essential to have a bulletproof weather forecast, a good VHF, and a grasp of what the tides are up to, because if you do not work the tides, you are in for much frustration and disappointment, or possibly worse. To determine what the tides are up to, you need to think clearly. To think clearly, more coffee is necessary. Real coffee, in a cafetiere, with sugar and UHT milk to give the full Continental effect. It seems a good idea to climb back into the sleeping bag and drink it, read a book maybe, perhaps do some light fishing while you think.

But this is mere cowardice. Tide, forecast and gear are okay. Only the flesh is weak. So it is time not to give the flesh a chance. The sleeping bag departs into its watertight barrel. The morning rituals commence.

Lucille is a Drascombe longboat - a 21 foot open yawl with an outboard for emergencies and all the comforts of cruising except a cabin. Roll up the tent. Lash it on the side deck. Suddenly she stops looking like a cowboy's chuck wagon and reveals herself as a long, slim, elegant entity raring to go. Drop the centreboard. Haul out the mizzen to the bumkin, and heave on the jib sheet so the sail comes off the roller. There are other yachts anchored up there in the channel, their anchor lights primrose-yellow against the paling sky. Here comes the anchor, shedding a plume of white Scilly sand. Back the jib till the nose pays off on the starboard tack, then sheet in. Lucille starts sailing up the channel under jib and mizzen. The beauty of yawls: at the least provocation they will steer themselves while the helmsman takes a mackerel off the hook or (as now) hoists the mainsail. Up the sail goes, colourless in the early half-light, a tan gunter lug, on a honey-coloured wooden spar. Aft to the tiller. Trim up. The wake starts a small, efficient chuckle, and the windward rail drops. And away she goes on the flat water among the moorings, dipping to the puffs that come tumbling in from the Atlantic beyond the battleship-ram of Shipman's Head. Tack under Hangman's Island, averting eyes from the granite hook used in earlier times for the termination of pirates. Now Cromwell's Castle is on the forestay like a stone oil drum, and the nose is lifting to a trace of swell finding its way down from the northward. Lucille glides right up to the castle's foundation. Walk the tiller over. Tack again. The channel is widening out as she fiddles throught the pot-buoys under the north end of Bryher. The swell is going up and down the nose of Shipman's head like a lift. For a moment, that giant lump of granite steals the wind. There is a hefty puff, then calm again. The mainsail flaps twice and fills. All of a sudden Shipman's Head is on the port quarter, and the wind is blowing true and steady, and the world has changed.

This is the deep sea. To the north and west, the Atlantic stretches away forever. If you grassed over the swell and put it in your back garden, an estate agent would call it an attractive landscape feature. Half a mile north of the head, I wait for the top of a swell and put the tiller over. Lucille tacks, and settles on WSW by the compass on the centreboard case. Ease the mainsheet until the luff lifts, then haul in three inches. The wake's gurgle becomes a roar. We are twenty-one feet of wind-powered civilization, with stove, chart table with perspex top, loaf of Mother's Pride and ocean-racing oilskins from Henri Lloyd, in a huge wild world on the western edge of everything. The Bishop Rock is a bright twink on the bow.

At this point, the plans change. A circumnavigation of Scilly had seemed entirely reasonable, thirty miles or so. Looks easy on the chart, in the squalid but homely surroundings of the tent. But off the business end of Shipman's Head, with the world going up and down even as little as six feet, it is becoming clear that people who say that water shrinks a boat are telling nothing but the truth. The Bishop is 44 meters high, but from here it looks the size of a Swan vesta. Furthermore, it is sitting next to some of the evilest of rocks known to geography, which have in their time chewed liners to iron filings - the Crim, the Retarrier Ledges, and no fewer than three sets of Tearing Ledges. There are wives and children waiting at home. It is time to revise the route, postponing the Bishop for a time when I am sailing in something with a cabin and a keel.

Self-indulgent mariners hereabouts tend to clamber into the public bar of the Turk's Head, Agnes' excellent pub, and set about the Tinners' Ale. Lucille is made of sterner stuff. So off we go, hard aport, broad-reaching across Smith Sound between Agnes and St Mary's, main route into the archipelago from the mainland, across Porthcressa and round Peninnis Head. The swell is neutralised here under the lee of St Mary's. The sun is out. Shags dry their wings on a pimple of rock in the calm blue sea. The calm is somewhat misleading. The rock is the Gilstone, on which Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel wrecked HMS Association and three other ships in 1707 The wrecks were a result of the Admiral's ignoring local knowledge or because the charts were wrong, depending on whom you believe. Shovel drifted ashore. An old woman finished him off, then bit off his fingers to get his rings. This gives a gloomy cast to the mariner's reflections. So does the express-train roar as an Islander, just taken off from St Mary's airport, puts one wheel either side of the gaff peak and thunders out to sea.

It is important not to let this kind of thing get to you. So I rummaged in the locker for a can of beer, hung a fishing line overboard, and disposed myself on the bottom boards. Lucille trucked gently along. There is a drowsy feeling to the world, the feeling that arrives when the breeze is light and steady and it is just about high water and just about lunchtime, and you might as well lash the tiller and let the boat sail herself and think about this and that. Those who go sailing in small boats will recognize the flaw in this, viz. that thinking about this and that is scarcely on the menu. After the relaxation has lasted twenty-five seconds, the fishing line gives a jolt, and I am up and hauling, and in comes a lunch-sized mackerel. Which means stove out, frying pan out, Mother's Pride and lemon out, gut and behead mackerel, press belly down on board provided, remove bones, fry, and transform into sandwich for which Rick Stein would probably charge twenty quid. The coast of St Mary's is trending away NW now, opening out a sheet of high-water blue between St Martin's and Tresco. The breeze, taking full advantage of the fetch offered, thumps heftily into the mainsail. Lucille digs in her starboard rail. I kick the bungy off the tiller, leap for the uphill side of the boat, and eat the sandwich while frying pan and stove clatter away into the lee lockers. The Eastern Islands are on the bow, home of seals and deep, mysterious lagoons. But this is no time for seals and mysteries. The wind is over the tide and the waves are nasty little pyramids and up goes the bow into the sky and down again, wham, white water everywhere, except on the sandwich, which I have rapidly stuffed into my oilskin pocket. And on we go, worrying our way through those nasty little seas and into the calmer water between the islands, casting nervous glances at the chart between Great Arthur and Ganinick, studded with little asterisks of rocks.

Beyond the islands are St Martin's Flats, well covered now. The wind has backed westerly, which means it is a beat down to Tobaccoman's Ledge at the southwesternmost corner of Tresco, Lucille emitting the small hum that means she is in perfect tune. The water is flat here, sheltered by the shoals and ledges we must thread. The sun is hot. The Crow Bar slides under the centreboard. After the bar, squint southward to pick up the TV mast on St Mary's and the iron-blobbed stalk of the Crow Beacon. When the two come into line, tack. Diamond Ledge glides by on the port side, glassy water and the long, trailing weed known as Aunty Gwen's Hair. Hold the mark over the stern as Tresco's eastern beaches unreel. The sand is sugar-white under the marram and pines, the water clear as vodka straight out of the freezer and not much warmer, turning with depth Nile green through turquoise to Quink blue, more like the West Indies than thirty miles off Land's End. The breeze smells of heather. Again, the drowsy numbness descends. And why the hell not?

There is a reason. Cheese Rock is abeam, and it is time to say goodbye to the Crow, put the helm up, and start to whizz along Old Grimsby channel. But somewhere bang in the middle of the channel, and I can never remember where, is Tide Rock. So I have the helm lashed and I am up in the nose hanging my head over the side like an idiot, and Lucille is shearing through the green silky water at some five knots, and I am contemplating the extreme beauty of the little turquoise curl her stem peels out of the sea. When from the deeps there leaps a pale thing, streaming weed like witch-hair, and Lucille sails right over the top of it: Tide Rock. Missed it by six inches.

On goes Lucille, a self-contained universe sliding by the distant shouts of children crabbing on Old Grimsby quay, and the Island Hotel, where elegant people fritter away luxurious days among sub-tropical plants. Civilisation is never more than the blink of an eye on Scilly. Old Grimsby vanishes behind a headland. The bottom of the sea drops away. The swell is running in from the north, creamy under the black rock and white buildings of Round Island light. The world is going up and down again, and the wind is blowing hard and steady, and I am sitting on the top rail with the swell rolling in eight-foot curls over the Golden Ball to starboard, and to port the ghastly black Kettle, boiling. It is beginning to feel like a long day. Tack round the Kettle. Keep the house at the root of New Grimsby quay outside Cromwell's Castle, so as not to make a dent in Gimble Rock. And down the channel we go, past the yachts, past the quay. Get rid of the main. Roll up the jib. Lucille rounds up, the mizzen holding her head to wind. Down goes the hook into the green deep. Back she falls, sets it, and lies quiet. The stove is tangled up with the signal flags, and the bilges are full of Mother's Pride. The curlews are crying again, and the gulls are quarrelling by the Great Pool. Soon it will be low water.

Sam Llewellyn
Drascombe Longboat LUCILLE

Sam is an accomplished sailor and author. This article which first appeared in PBO 12/2002 has been reproduced with his permission for the enjoyment of DA members. [For anyone just starting to get to grips with SOLAS regulation 34, this article does not constitute a passage plan! Ed]