dinghy record crossings

No need to ask permission - just follow shipping rules and pack your passport!

Not too sure if the rules get tighter up towards Dover, but then I've never sailed up there and have never needed to look into it.

 

Not sure what all this asking permission business is all about - as far as I know if you want to sail across the channel, you sail across the channel.  If you break the regulations covering the traffic seperation scheme, you will be fined.  If you don't, you won't.

 

Can anyone substantiate these ideas that you need to ask permission?

Originally posted by tickler I have put this on before but it seems to match this post. Uffa Fox built a  sort of 20'  IC with 2 sliding seats in 1935, "she was very long and had easy buttocks". His intention was a  boat capable of exeeding 20kts which it did not manage. His 17' canoe managed 16.3kts over 1/2 of a mile. The 20' boat was called Brynhild and in June 1935 Uffa and his crew, Bill, set out at 6 am from the Solent to sail to Cherbourg carrying  2 primus stoves a typwriter and assorted luggage. They experienced variable weather on the crossing, at times having to reef and other times almost without wind. They reached Cherbourg at  7.30 pm exacly 12 hours after passing the needles, an average speed of 5kts. They then had a jolly holliday cruising the French coast. Remember wooden spars and cotton sails, no hi-tech clothing or sat phone just oilskins and kapok lifejackets (if they bothered at all). There is a picture of Uffa Fox sailing a canoe in just his knickers!  Real men? or just lacking imagination?

He also took a bunch of sea scouts across the channel and then up the Seine on a camping trip. I was told that the parents didnt even know they were crossing the channel but thought he was taking them camping locally. Of course before mobile phones the little darlings would only have told mummy and daddy after they got home.

If you must cross the channel for the heck of it, up this end of it, trail
your boat over there and come this way, no laws preventing your arrival
here, whereas if you go the other way, you'll get pulled.

But you must consult with al the relevant authority's this end, and you
should take a support boat, it gets very gnarly in the middle with a
serious short steep egg box that makes planing next to impossible in the
middle in mid range wind.

It is run using very sophisticated computerised radar equipment and you
wouldn't necessarily show up without a radar reflector. My chum is now
one of the Coastguards that run it, and one of my reps is part of the
coast watch service that keep an eye on this stretch from one of several
lookout posts.

It is the most watched section of the channel, it being the shortest
smuggling route from Europe. Drugs, Drink, People, Cigarettes and of
course the annual nutters that insist on doing it in anything from bath
tubs to bicycle power.

And having sailed, skied & windsurfed across it i can tell you from
experience it is the most boring thing to go across and not very
hospitable at times, but I'd be more than willing to give anyone pointers
should they decide to do it.

Edited by G.R.F.

That's truely hardcore.