Sailing The North Sea | Sailing Florence – Ep.183

It feels so good to be sailing. Love it. We're going for the reef okay? Yeah. We are Matt and Amy. We are sailing our 37-foot sailboat Florence on an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the UK. In the last episode we received our new sails and sailed round from Portsmouth on the south coast to Lowestoft on the east coast. This episode sees us navigating north up the North Sea overnight dodging wind farms and dealing with tidal currents to reach the beautiful port of Whitby. It's been a really short but sweet stop here in Lowestoft. We've literally just had enough time to eat dinner, sleep, have a shower and now the weather is looking like we should be setting off this morning. But it's been a really good stop because not only has it allowed us to set off fresh with a good night's sleep but it's also improved the conditions or the state of the tide as we're coming out of here and it hopefully also means that we're going to be arriving in our next port in daylight instead of during the night. So yeah, all around a very short but very good the coast of Norfolk and crossing the Wash as we sail 150 miles for the historic town of Whitby. This should take us around 30 hours and we'll take a look at a place along the way which is very close to my heart. We've been having a beautiful sail along the coast up from Lowestoft all morning. We're just getting to the point where Norfolk curves around away from us and we're going to be heading out into the North Sea. You can see up ahead of us there's quite a lot of white water and that's because we've still got the tide with us which is really great. We've got two and a half knots of tide with us but then once we get out of here the wind is against that tide so it sets up a steep choppy sea so we might be bouncing around a bit already starting to now. Well we needed a bit of a shakedown sail after our refit and Florence seems to be taking it well. It's a relief that this is not causing any leaks in our new tow rail stanchions or windows. I think this is why they call it the wash. It is definitely like a washing machine. Florence knows what to do. Florence knows what to do. We've got 19 knots maybe gusting 20 true just giving us 25 knots over the deck. Stay sail and two reefs in the main sail at the moment. Considering going three reefs in the main sail because we don't want to push her too hard. This is really nice though. It's nice to be in these sorts of conditions and actually feel refreshed and I'm enjoying it. You might not say that tomorrow morning. I might not say that tomorrow morning but at the moment I am definitely enjoying it. Feels so good to be sailing. Love it. It's getting breezy so we're going to go for the third reef. We don't need all this main sail anymore. It's not brilliant. We'll have to have a little look at that when it's calmed down. I think it's just the way that the sail's folded. Okay can I come down now? Yep. Well that wasn't as sweet as normal. The blue for the third reef didn't come in very neatly. I don't think I had it getting quite the right place on the boom so I had to go and fiddle with it quite a bit. Should have put it up, checked it all. I went and first put the main sail back on the boat instead of waiting till now. Okay. Put it on also? Yeah. Love it. Loving it a little bit. That was you just pressing that? Yeah. Yeah. It is breezy. I think we're gonna get wet as well. Well it's an absolutely beautiful evening for sailing now. Just changed so much when the tide turned and then the wind dropped off as well and I mean we were drifting for a while but now we've got a nice little bit of breeze not quite from the right direction. Just listened to the shipping forecast and we're supposed to have a lot more wind than we do at the moment but at least we're still moving so just enjoying what we got in that weather earlier. Unfortunately beautiful now but when we're going over those waves early we did actually have a little bit of damage. The dinghy on the foredeck, the blocks it's attached to broke so when we get over to Whitby we're have to do a bit of epoxying and screwing. I thought we were done with that from the refit but clearly not. If that's the worst we have that's not too much for a problem to fix. It's a beautiful morning this morning and we've made our way through all of those oil rigs and wind farms and we're making really good progress towards Whitby our destination but we've just tacked inshore to make a little detour into a bay which is very special to me and I'm not sure exactly how far we're going to be able to get into the bay because it's actually spring tides at the moment and we are just approaching absolute dead low water but I'm hoping that I'll be able to show you a little bit of where my love of sailing began. We're heading into a little bay called Filey. In the corner of the bay is my first and favourite sailing club. We joined there when I was about six as a family and we used to live nearly 30 miles inland in the Yorkshire countryside but we didn't have a car for most of my childhood so we'd spend our weekends cycling here, camping over the weekend and then just sailing and playing in the sea. I absolutely loved it. We started off sailing boats that my dad built, wooden boats and that my mum made the sails for and the biggest of those that we had was a Tiki 21 that we sailed up and down the coast. We didn't have an engine for a lot of the time with that boat so we'd often get into anchorages and harbours by having one of us on each hull paddling the boat in but here in Filey we mostly sailed dinghies and different dinghies as we got older. No matter where I've sailed Filey Bay will always be a favourite place of mine because I had such a good time sailing here. It really set the course of my life and I knew that whatever I did I just wanted sailing to be part of it. Unfortunately today we are a bit pushed for time and so we're going to have to head on to Whitby because the entrance there is tidally dependent. We need to get through the bridge at a specific time so we're going to head on to Whitby. We're passing inside the Bellboy which when I was little used to be this really far out mark that I occasionally used to sail around if I was feeling brave and today it feels a very long way inshore. From Filey Bay we sailed close along the tide ripping across the entrance so we had to do quite a few tacks to get up and in but it's absolutely beautiful and flat calm once you get in here. Really historic place. I'm really looking forward to exploring around here. So this is North Yorkshire which is the county that I grew up in. We're about an hour away from the tiny little village that was my childhood home. It's an absolutely beautiful spot and we're just waiting for the bridge to open before we can head into into the town itself. I can smell... I'm not sure whether I can smell fish and chips or a pint and a pie but something very similar to that I think. Definitely need to do that here. It's actually quite a lot of ice cream shops along the I think we can spend a few days here quite happily. First ice cream of the trip. Yorkshire ice cream as well. Delicious. With Matt's ice cream craving satisfied we had a wander around the narrow streets to find Whitby's unique jewellery industry. So this is Whitby Jet. It's a fossilized driftwood from the Jurassic. So it's about 183 million years old. It's unique to this area of the world really in this particular form. So we've got about seven miles up and down the coastline where the jet's in the cliffs potentially and as the sea erodes the cliffs are where we now collect it, beach comb for it and turn it into jewellery. So if you've not heard of Whitby Jet you might have heard of the term Jet Black and it comes from this material courtesy of Mr Shakespeare. It's been used for jewellery for about five and a half thousand years. Most again if you've heard of it you've probably heard of the fact that Victorians were really into it for the whole morning fashion that they were into. So Jet was perfect because it's the epitome of black and it's very light in weight as well. It's low density so that doesn't doesn't it looks heavy and sort of almost quite miserable but it's not. It's quite a it's a very lightweight lightweight material. So nowadays we set it in silver and gold. We've got quite a decent industry still in Whitby. Lots of little businesses collect their jet and bring it back to the workshops like we do and work it here. One of the brilliant features about sailing around the coast of the UK is that wherever we stop we've got this fantastic coastal path running the entire way around so we just need to choose whether we want to go left or right in the 7th century and then it later became an abbey. It was abandoned when they had a lot of viking raids in this area and this whole area actually some of the names of the places still have viking names so there's a lot of Thorpes around here which is a viking name for village I believe. And then like all of the monasteries in the UK this abbey became a ruin in Henry VIII's rule when they had the dissolution of the monasteries. Of course Whitby is also famous for being the place where Captain Cook learned his seafaring trade before setting out to explore the globe and also where the ships he sailed on were built just next to where Florence is moored. Well the wind has been howling through the rigging all day here today. Florence is snugly tied up at the dock in the marina in Whitby. We've been looking at the weather for sailing on and at the moment it's blowing 20 gusting 25 knots in here so definitely don't want to be out there because also blowing from the north which is exactly where we want to go. We've already been here for a few days it looks like we're going to be here for a few more until the wind finally looks like it's going to turn around and come from the south which will be a much more comfortable onward passage. Not sure at the moment where we're going to head to, whether or not we stop a little bit further up this coast or whether we just go straight up to the Scottish islands which is where we ultimately want to get to and spend some time in more remote anchorages up there. Sailing north up this coast you seem to get little snippets of southerly breeze for like two or three days and it turns around and blows really hard from the north again and you end up waiting in port for a week for it to turn around. We could sail upwind in this, Florence could do it but it would be really really uncomfortable. It would put a lot more strain on the boat and when we went through that windy patch just off of Norfolk we broke the dinghy blocks and we had a big wave come over the bow, fixed them whilst we're here. Much more prudent to wait out a breeze like this and carry on when it calms down a bit which is to say hopefully happen in a few days time. It's not just the wind that we have to worry about getting out of Whitby, it's actually quite a shallow entrance to the harbour here so we need to time the tide as well and also we need to make sure it's not too big a sea state. So you've got a big sea state coming in that can prevent anything from getting out of this harbour entrance as well. So there's quite a lot to think about when passage planning up this coast. Next time we push on sailing north to Scotland and receive a very warm welcome. For extra updates in between these bi-weekly videos and to find out what we're up to in real time head over to Patreon and join the crew. Of course don't forget to subscribe to make sure that you don't miss the next episode here on YouTube. Continuing our voyage on Florence would not be possible without the support of our Patrons. Thank you to all of you and especially to our Star Patrons.