Below is a report of our passage sailing the lifeboat from Fishguard to Portishead where most of the restoration work will take place.

Well it was an entertaining passage. Three days all at sea, in more ways than one.
The boat had been built as the Stromness lifeboat in 1952. They have big weather up in Orkney, so she was immensely strong and seaworthy. On the other hand, she was sold out of RNLI service almost twenty years ago, and there were no guarantees what her standard of maintenance had been since then. There was a survey done in 2001, which was reassuring.
She is 52 feet long, pointed at both ends. A small sleeping cabin occupies the bow, with the engine room just behind it. This contains two big Ford marine diesel engines. Behind that, in the middle of the boat, is the wheelhouse, and behind that a big aft cabin.
We joined ship at Fishguard on Friday night. There was Andy the skipper, who was ex RNLI crew, his dad, Gary the mechanic, who had considerable experience on this specific type of boat and their engines, and me with all my experience from twenty years ago as delivery crew and liveaboard sailor, as passage planner and navigator. I hoped I wasn’t too rusty. The deputy coxswain of the Fishguard lifeboat helped us get aboard, and gave us some very useful passage advice. Lifeboats, old and new, are very much a family!
We pushed off from Fishguard at 0430 on a dismal Saturday morning. Dawn was rising, i.e. it was going from dull grey to a slightly lighter grey. It was raining. However, the forecast was for three or four days of light winds and gentle weather, which we needed for a delivery passage in an untried boat which hadn’t been to sea for three years. All at once the first problem showed itself. Both engines ran well, with good steady oil pressures, but the port gearbox would only work going astern.
I’d emphasised to Andy that the entire power plant needed to be thoroughly serviced, the oil changed, new filters, etc, before we went anywhere, but he, being a nice guy, and a trusting sort, had accepted an assurance from the previous owner that this had been done. In his place I wouldn’t have. It also appeared that our GPS receiver, which had not been tested before setting off, wasn’t working, which left all the navigation up to me and my very traditional skills, which involve position fixing by landmarks, a skill which hasn’t changed much for thousands of years.
The starboard engine seemed happy enough, so we set off along the north Pembrokeshire coast. After a few hours we passed through Ramsey Sound, a beautiful, but very naughty, piece of water, with various ferocious rocks, tiderips, etc. I’d timed us to arrive here at slack water, so, without too much current, it wasn’t too bad. However, this meant we were going around the next corner, at Skomer island, at about half tide, and did the tide-race throw us about? But we were driving an ex-lifeboat, after all, and a quick turn left through Broad Sound took us clear of the worst of the Wild Goose Race, and into my favourite harbour of Dale, where the Griffen Inn did us an excellent lunch.
We were also visited by another ex-lifeboat, which cheered us up immensely. The boat was in excellent condition. The boathandling, however, was pure cabaret. Imagine approaching a mooring buoy to pick it up, charging at it, running clean over it, somehow avoiding getting all the ropes around the prop, and then setting off towing the thing, until it vanished under water, and something parted with an audible thud. We watched with a mixture of hysteria and disbelief. It made us feel much better about our boathandling.
We pushed off for Ilfracombe that evening, timing it to carry the helpful tide up the Bristol channel. Butting a foul tide with one engine is a mug’s game. But after a very few miles, the starboard engine failed completely, leaving us with the option of going astern on port, (which was at least enough to keep us off any rocks) or stopping completely. Andy and Gary managed to get it going again, but they also reported the situation to coastguards, which I must confess I wouldn’t have. I would simply have got it going again and kept quiet about it.
So we were escorted into Tenby by their nice modern Tyne class lifeboat; the first time in forty years’ sailing I’ve become a lifeboat customer! However, we came in under our own power, so it wasn’t really a rescue, and the approach to Tenby is a little tricky in the dark; the marker buoys don’t have lights on them; so it was probably all for the good.
The coxswain asked me a few deceptively gentle but actually very searching questions; like “you’re going to push on straight away in the morning then?” “No”, says I. “We’re going to check all the fuel lines and filters before we make any decisions at all, and incidentally we’ve been logging oil pressures every half hour to identify any tendency to fall before it becomes serious, and they are steady as a rock. Also, the hull doesn’t leak at all”. He seemed much reassured.
Next morning Andy and Gary spent a couple of hours clanging spanners and swearing down in the engine room, after which we pushed off on the flood tide for Swansea, on a brilliant day, with the starboard engine purring like a contented cat. The port side wouldn’t start at all now, but with its gearbox problem it wasn’t really doing us any good, so we weren’t worried.
On the whole I would still rather have been under sail. The enclosed wheelhouse, which kept the draughts off, was a nice luxury, but basically driving a big motorboat is very much like driving a bus, although not quite so interesting. As Tal said, when I described it to him later, there are no interesting bends in the road, and the scenery is all the same colour.
You sit behind this big diesel engine, going RRRRRR RUR RRRR RER RRRR for hour after hour, steering a straight course by compass or landmark. And it smells. The smell of oil, diesel fuel and exhaust varies from a gentle niff to a choking miasma, but it’s always there.
Off the Gower coast a little inflatable inshore lifeboat came out to have a look at us, with the crew all smiles, then buzzed away. We got into Swansea on the top of the tide, where Andy charged off to the local Sainsbury’s for hot cooked chicken, bread rolls, salad and melon. We had a lovely picnic on deck. A good skipper feeds his crew well!
Actually Andy was a very good skipper indeed. It was always clear that he was in charge, but, unlike some blokes, he was always ready to listen to advice. I have sailed with people who will ignore advice on general principles, just because it’s given. Keeping the balance between being firmly in charge on the one hand, but listening to what people have to offer on the other, is not easy to do well. It is one of the most important aspects of being a good skipper.
We shoved off that night on the bottom of the tide, to carry the flood all the way up-channel to Portishead, which was our destination. I’d pushed hard for this. The rest of the crew were a little nervous about sailing at night, but actually it’s easy enough. You pick your way from lighthouse to lighthouse, and count the flashes. They are all different, so you can’t get lost. One lighthouse may flash twice every fifteen seconds. Or a marker buoy which warns of a reef may have a strobe which flicks a group of nine quick flashes every fifteen seconds.
Besides, everyone was getting a little tired, so it seemed a good idea to finish the trip before people started getting really bushed. I was the only member of the crew who seemed able to sleep solidly on a boat, whether in harbour or at sea. I can sleep anywhere! It goes back to having been a delivery crew on some fairly rough long passages. You grab food and sleep wherever you can, as you never know when you’re going to get any more.
Also I had an odd feeling about the weather, and wanted to use the good weather while we could. As it happened, I was right. The next day there were great curtains of rain sweeping up-channel, which would have reduced the visibility to about a mile, and made visual navigation difficult.
So we pushed off at 2100. It was a lovely night, with hardly any wind, and about twenty miles visibility. There was one slightly odd moment, when we were coming round the Scarweather reef. I’d never sailed in this part of the Bristol Channel before, but I suddenly realised I’d heard the name before, about fifty years ago, when my dad used to tell me tales of his war service. For one strange moment, in the gathering dusk, I could see the ghost of a rusty battered old trawler, hastily converted to a minesweeper, clattering and wheezing along, with its original crew of tough fishermen, and one seasick Welsh schoolteacher in command.
The passage up-channel was one out of the textbook. By now I was well into the groove again. Despite not having done any navigation for over ten years, I hadn’t forgotten anything,
I was starting to show off; measuring speed accurately between fixed marks, then using this to predict our arrival time to the nearest minute at the next mark, chuckling and saying “I do love it when things go according to plan” when the next mark turned up on the nose and bang on time.
We arrived at Portishead at 0515 on Monday morning. I’d actually aimed for 0518, which was top slack water, a good time to be entering a new harbour, but three minutes out in a three day passage is an acceptable margin of error. Gary said he was extremely impressed with my navigation. I said I was extremely impressed with the way he’d kept the clockwork functioning. Andy ran me home. All in all, it had been a good passage, and we’d been a good crew.