An English Summer 56

 

Storm Evert screams and shrieks. A herring gull, not normally a welcome visitor aboard, bedraggled and weary, takes refuge on the pushpit. Riding it, wings spread for balance, as Stargazer bucks and rears. Wind driven spray breaking over the decks. Swell rolling through the anchorage. The wind ever rising: thirty mph , thirty five, forty seven. Surely the storm has peaked? fifty, fifty eight, sixty two, seventy. Think, standing on a car roof, in the outside lane of the motorway, in a rainstorm; for my hourly deck walk, to check of the anchor rode . The bird provides a reassuring presence, a portent of hope, until darkness falls.

The night inches by. Each forecast update extends the peak of the storm, an hour or two more. Scilly is taking Evert's full force. The wind backs south, through west, to north and then veers back to northwest. 

I stand, in the shelter of the windscreen and hood, on the top step of the companionway, hatch open, washboards in, peering, meerkat like, into the dark. Checking that Stargazer's anchor is holding. Watching, helpless, as a Regina drags by, mooring ball still attached. As a rescue helicopter lights the anchorage, to airlift the crew of a drifting Rustler, from the foot of the cliffs. As a Jeanneau, mainsail escaped from its lashings, ballooning with wind, careers through the tethered boats, its anchor fouled with weed, unable to stop.

At last dawn breaks. With it comes a vibrant rainbow, in a black sky; and the realisation that we have survived this storm unscathed. 

Sixteen kilos of Delta anchor, twenty four metres of eight millimetre chain (high water depth seven point four metres), and great good fortune, have brought us through.

Others have not been so lucky. More so those on moorings. In particular those whose moorings were on the Tresco shore of the sound, which had the least lee from Bryher and were worst affected by swell, when the wind went fully north, for two hours at the peak of the storm.

The boats, all over forty feet, bodily dragged their moorings, downwind and downtide, toward the cliffs of Tresco. And were lucky not to be driven ashore. Today, the Harbour Master (far left) busily supervises the relaying of the affected buoys.

Including the lifting of their concrete sinkers (the weight which acts as an anchor for the mooring). 

As he toils, dinghies flit from boat to boat. Tales are told. Joy and relief scent the sun filled air. Twenty five and thirty knot gusts still roll down, from Bryher's hills, but today that feels like a balmy summer zephyr.