One too many Maydays
It was a warm, calm sunny Sunday morning in August 1996 when we left our visitor’s mooring off Mixtow, a sheltered creek about 1.5km up the river from Fowey, Cornwall.
What a contrast the weather was to the bedlam we’d experienced before we arrived the previous day. The harbour patrol had told us to moor upriver in our Sadler 34, Rozel, because the southerly gale had made the main harbour untenable. We motored back down river to Fowey to raft next to a pretty 30ft wooden sloop on the town quay. She looked a sorry sight with a broken tiller and her boom strewn with wet weather clothing and bedding drying in the sunshine. The chap in the cockpit who introduced himself as Rob told us how they’d been knocked down the day before off Dodman Point. He told us how his partner had been washed overboard after going through and destroying her tiller. Luckily she had been attached by her safety line and Rob had been able to pull her back on board.
It turned out that we’d also been sailing round Dodman Point about an hour after their near disaster.
