England My England: The Crossing That Humbled Us

Oh, what amazing weather we have encountered in the two weeks since we arrived on your fair shores. Now reader, since I grew up on this chilly island, I know better than most that England’s weather is a fickle mistress - the kind who acts like your best friend and then steals your Husband - so we cherish every sunny day with the full knowledge that it will be short-lived, and could indeed change within the hour….or minute.

Take, for example, our passage from Falmouth, Cornwall to Wales. Last week, after enjoying this lovely south coast fishing town immensely, we planned for our next passage further up the west of England and across the Bristol Channel to Wales. The passage was going to take nineteen hours, which of course required us to leave at sparrow’s-fart o’clock. I don’t know why we are always leaving at midnight; stealing into the night like criminals who haven’t paid their marina bill, but I don’t make the rules…. 

This passage was predicted to be fairly mild - two to three feet waves, a breezy ten knots of wind, nothing a reasonably adept crew should lose sleep over, which is exactly the kind of sentence the sea enjoys punishing you for…Come to think of it I actually think I heard her softly cackling in glee, but mistook it for a seagull with laryngitis.

By now, with over five thousand miles of passage-making under our belts, including that not so easy jaunt across the Atlantic, we had become a little blasé about this whole sailing business. A piffling nineteen hours across a channel that isn’t even an ocean? How bad could it be?

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Reader, let me tell you, it was the worst sea state we have yet encountered. Six feet waves, dead on the nose, arriving in intervals so short they came at you like trying to do a gym class with my fit sister - exhausting, eternal and every new movement brings fresh discomfort. The boat spent nineteen hours climbing each wave, cresting, and then flinging itself down the other side as if trying to punish us for our bad weather planning. “You asked for it,” Moonfleet seemed to be saying. The sea just laughed gleefully.

There is nothing quite like bracing yourself against various bits of boat just to stop yourself from falling for nineteen straight hours to make you reconsider every choice that led you here, starting with the purchase of the boat itself.

Gypsy, for her part, staged her own personal protest, producing violent streams of complaint from three separate orifices onto the not-so-cream carpet. Who likes carpet on a boat, anyway? Ken discovered a new level of purgatory specifically reserved for people mopping up dog emissions whilst trying not to fall into the very crime scene he was attempting to clean up. Fortunately, the Gods of Boating Wives briefly smiled upon me, and I was below deck asleep for most of “the emission session”- a fact that Ken has not let me forget.

Eventually, the next morning, we limped into Milford Haven, Wales, without a shred of the happy, confident sailors who had left Falmouth two watches and what seemed a lifetime earlier. I believe this is what people mean when they say the ocean humbles everyone. At this point, even the boat seemed to be sulking.

However, fools go where angels fear to tread, so after a day of recovery, we were ready to explore our fourteenth country - if you can call Wales a country, which the Welsh very much do, so we will too, but quietly, because we can’t pronounce any of the words. The first thing I noticed was that every sign is written twice; once in English, and once in what appears to be a scrabble joke. I had assumed, after our stay in the Azores, that Portuguese was the linguistic bad boy of Europe, but Welsh seems to have opted out of vowels altogether, preferring instead to stack consonants like a mad juggler, with a brave little “y” randomly appearing. We spoke to one jolly homegrown local and he claimed that even though it is mandatory for kids to learn in school, very few actually speak it - although I did hear an elderly gentleman talking to his dog in Welsh, and the dog seemed to understand completely.

Our best superpower for meeting locals remains our dog Gypsy (coincidentally named prior to us actually becoming gypsies), and never more so than in England, where the general population appears to love dogs slightly more than their own children and considerably more than tourists - so I encourage my American husband to stay silent and let Gypsy do the talking. Everywhere we go, Gypsy is greeted warmly - sometimes in Welsh - and occasionally the greeter’s eyes will travel up the leash to acknowledge the human attached to it, though this step is by no means guaranteed.

We have introduced Gypsy to Welsh beaches, where she wallows joyfully among the slimy, seaweed covered rocks, in water cold enough to stop a heart, alongside a cheerful bevy of women of a certain age who seem to enjoy the exact same thing for reasons I cannot explain and will never understand. A friend of mine was once persuaded to try a remedial ocean plunge in England, in February. Disastrously her rather liberally enhance lip filler froze and she couldn’t speak for days without a lisp. For Gypsy, I suspect it is simply a relief to be somewhere that doesn’t move.

Everyone here is remarkably friendly - the kind of place where people meet your eye as you pass and genuinely smile, rather than performing the urban desperate gaze avoidance I’ve come to expect in cities. Walking to the beach to admire the famous Pembrokeshire coastline yesterday, we passed an old man with a bedraggled little dog, who hailed us with his walking stick like he was flagging down a bus. “You’re a bit late today,” he informed us. “You missed it - they had ponies in the water this morning.” I still don’t know whether he mistook us for someone else, or whether we had, without realizing it, been automatically inducted into some sort of club reserved exclusively for people who walk dogs on beaches. Let’s hope Welsh speaking is not mandatory.

After scrubbing poor Moonfleet clean of the Bristol Channel trauma and finally locating a very cool Welsh dragon courtesy flag to proudly fly, we are off later today to a North Wales town called Pwllheli - pronounced something like “puffwelly”. It apparently translates to “salt water pool,” which feels like false advertising for a word that sounds like it should mean “the sound the author makes when she’s rowing the new canoe to shore against a current when her Husband has insisted anchoring a mile away from land.” It’s another 15 hour passage, most of which, no surprise, has to happen at night, apparently to get the enormous tide right before the water disappears, and also, according to Ken, to avoid annoying the Ceffyl Dŵr, an ancient Welsh water spirit he now claims to believe in only when it’s convenient for passage planning.

I just wish we would pay our marina bill…

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