Not surprisingly, despite us being hundreds of miles away from Dover, the tidal times at the narrowest part of the English Channel are used to determine what is happening with the rest of the channel. Alas, as we planned to leave Cherbourg to head west then south down to St Malo we needed to carefully plan our trip to take advantage of the tidal flows around Cap de la Hague which exceed 10 knots in certain areas and can whip up like a boiling cauldron if wind opposes tide.

Using our trusty Nautical Almanac 2023 we turn to page 268 to find the Dover tides for the day to see that HW Dover on Friday 21st April is noted at 11:54. This is Universal Time! In France in summer local time is UT+2 hours so 13:54, so now we know what time HW is. Now looking at the tidal currents and reading the passage information: “SW-bound, arrive 2 miles NW off Cap de la Hague at around HW Dover -00:40 when the stream will be slack, whilst just starting to run off Alderney. Leave Cherbourg 3 hours before using the inshore W-going tidal eddy”, so that’s 10:54. We chose Friday as our day as the winds were coming from NE and would push us along through The Race together with the tide. However, as the winds strengthen we would be pinned against our mooring, so we decided to depart at 09:30 and take a slow sail up to the Cap de la Hague waypoint.

We zoomed along and soon dropped our sails to reduce our speed while watching the AIS location of other sail boats who left later but rapidly caught up with us to hit the waypoint at the same time. Having other boats around us was reassuring that we had planned the passage correctly.

Passing through the Alderney Race on our second sail is an achievement, and without the knowledge gained during the ‘coastal skipper’ theory course it would have been fool-hardy to attempt. We know that this first leg of our adventure, travelling down from the UK to the Canaries would be probably the hardest in many ways; we are still shaking down the boat, we are rapidly getting used to her limits (moreover ours), and the technicality of 10 meter tidal ranges and currents mixed in with the cold and stormy April winds leaves no shortage of challenges when compared to a week in the Greek Ionian.

All crew faired well and we arrived in St Malo before sunset despite a nasty squall hitting us 2 hours before arrival with winds quickly increasing from 10 to 35 knots changing the sea state from calm to uncomfortable: it is the sea state more than the wind that determines whether we have a good or bad passage, we can trim the sails to whatever wind, but there’s not much we can do for a rocky sea once you are in it. Everything and everyone got bounced around for a couple of hours spoiling what was a champagne sailing day.

So now our floaty home is in St Malo and we will stay here for a few days, it looks very pretty with lots to explore and we have a few boat jobs to do too.