"Out Of The Harbour And Ninety Left"

Some years ago, as well as co-driving for Mark Jephcott in his rally cars I was also coerced into navigating a yacht for him. Weekends not spent in the forests were spent racing from Newhaven or Brighton marinas, with the odd foray to Cowes or Torbay. Occasionally I also navigated for his brother David, who as well as rallying also sailed.

I gave up sailing about 4 years ago when I decided that Mark was far more dangerous on a boat, than he ever was in rally car. When we were rallying, if he had a choice of tyres, he would probably change to something else. On a boat if he had a sail not being used he would almost certainly put it up, often leading to broken rigging or the boat attempting to behave akin to a submarine.

One evening sitting at home trying to think of another article for the magazine, I got a phone call from David Jephcott, asking if I would help him move Mark's 30 ft racing yacht from Plymouth to Brighton, where it was to be sold. Unable to come up with a convincing excuse quickly enough, on the following Friday I found myself on a train heading for the west country.

Having loaded the boat up with food and drink, we checked the weather forecast, to find that there was going to be probably absolutely no wind. That meant that we would need to use the engine pretty well the whole way, so we filled up various jerry cans and stowed them in the cockpit. To make the best use of the tides in the channel to help our progress meant leaving Plymouth in the early hours of Saturday morning so we retired to the bar in the yacht club for a couple of hours,

Nowadays yacht navigation is very much an electronic process and we programmed the satellite navigation system to get us to Lymington where we planned to spend the evening in a pub.

Leaving Plymouth harbour at 5 am we turned 90 left to head along the south Devon coast. After about 3 hours we were off Salcombe and it was pretty obvious that we would not make Lymington before the pubs shut and if we were to get to Brighton at any sensible time on Sunday we would have to continue through the night. A change of route to south of the Isle of Wight and another look at the tide tables gave us a couple of hours to kill, so we went into Salcombe harbour to scrounge a cup of coffee off David's father, who lives there and pick up the papers. Setting off again we chugged our way eastward towards Start Point and Portland. On the way we passed numerous basking sharks ambling through the water. Now I know these are meant to be harmless, but the sight of two black fins on the back of a 25 ft fish is quite eerie.

We spent the night working 2 hours on 2 hours off, dodging various fishing trawlers and container ships to find ourselves at dawn just east of the Isle of Wight.

Due to arrive at Brighton in mid-afternoon we started to give some thought as to how A. I would get back to my car in Henfield, and B. how David would get to Emsworth where a car was waiting for him. Cruising past Chichester we came up with an answer. A quick phone call to Grant Steventon, Deputy Safety Officer Rallye Sunseeker saw him agreing to pick us up from Brighton and then I would drive David to Emsworth. Another phone call and we had invited ourselves to dinner at Neil and Annie Roden's - problem solved.

The afternoon was spent listening to the Grand Prix on David's latest toy, one of those wind up radios - though fortunately this one was also solar powered and we entered Brighton marina 10 minutes after the race finished to find Grant waiting for us with his Mitsubishi Evo 5.

We parked the boat alongside marks new boat with which he will be doing Cowes week and the Fastnet race loaded our gear into the Evo 5 and headed off to a meal and several well deserved gin & tonics.