The mutiny comes without warning. Perhaps they always do? At daybreak Stargazer is fifteen miles off Dieppe. Making for the Channel shipping lanes.
She had left harbour in the dark. Dodging the inshore stragglers and circling trawlers. Their deck lights ablaze. Making navigation lights difficult to discern, by eye. Relying instead on AIS, to guage their direction of travel.
Stargazer has picked up the south westerly, passage making, wind. She rides it into the dawn. Broad reaching in sixteen to eighteen knots, under the lee of the French shore. A precautionary reef in the main. For I expect the breeze to build, as we clear the land.
She lopes easily over a long swell. Herald of another big blow, forecast to come in overnight.
Surfs across the ever shifting slopes of steel blue sea. A foaming bow wave streams aft.
We are making between seven and eight knots, nine on the surfs. Stargazer's speed reducing the, now, over twenty knots of true wind, to fourteen apparent.
Beachy Head is a smudge on the horizon, by midday. The breeze up to twenty five knots with seas building. It is all too much, for our taciturn tiller-pilot. The silent stoic, on deck in all weathers, always steering a steady course, mutinies. Not to be recalled to duty, by any means which I have to hand. With the skipper now required at the helm, full time.
Rain squalls race through, as Stargazer romps across seas which are now rearing high. Stacking up as the bottom rises toward the Royal Sovereign shoals. Making a consistent eight knots. Helm light, as she begins to plane. Ordinarily I would have the second reef in by now. But cannot leave the tiller, to haul it down. Stargazer hums and resonates as she rockets, airborne, toward the striped safe-water mark, off Sovereign harbour.
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