Tidal predictions are all well and good but as Tom knows only too well, weather and technology can have detrimental effects on well laid plans
Last summer I was in Denmark when a forecast for a heavy westerly gale came through on the internet. Over there, it’s generally safe to rely on five days warning for this type of event. People start talking about it in good time. “Going to blow like hell at the weekend,” they say as you yarn on the dock, and they’re generally right.
As it happened, I was cruising the Little Belt at the time. This is one of the three passages into the Baltic through the many islands that form the State of Denmark. The western boundary of the Belt is the land mass of Jutland, so I had plenty of lee available. Inspection of the chart revealed the town of Haderslev on the Jutland shore. It lies at the top of a narrow eight-mile fjord open to the east at its seaward end, so you couldn’t ask for better shelter.
The knee-jerk picture generally formed of a fjord is a magnificent mountain-bordered chasm on the west coast of Norway. It’s not like that in Denmark. Haderslev Fjord is a river of more or less navigable depth meandering through woods and farmland up to a fine old town. We sailed up as far as we could, then motored the rest of the way to the town marina which, it must be said, proved a bit of a disappointment. Instead of a cosy group of pontoons in an area of slack water, a series of box berths were lined up off the south bank at right-angles to the stream. The river had narrowed considerably by now and the current was running merrily across the all-too-narrow berths, most which were occupied. A proper skipper’s nightmare. It was one of these situations where the only order to give the crew is: “Fenders out, warps ready, and stand by for a cock-up.”
I wasn’t wrong. The favoured hole lay between a nondescript motor cruiser upstream and a smart blue X-Yacht about the same length as us at 44ft flying the blue and gold of Sweden. The tide being behind us, I went past the berth, rounded up in the river, then approached up-stream aiming for the up-tide post. So long as my wife could get a loop around this, she could hand it to me for a stern line, then nip up forward to pass a bow line to the usual Scandinavian dockside loafer who always seems to pitch up to take a head rope. In we went, I misjudged the current, ran out of space, had to turn too soon and failed to get that vital stern-line on. The predicted longshoreman was
