I have written before about the day I spend each year with the Harbour staff, in the Office and on the water. This year the sun shone and the Harbour was busy-ish. Not busy-busy, because it was not yet the full school holidays, but a fair number of mostly sailing yachts, largely from Torbay, Dartmouth and Plymouth, with a smattering from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and the Channel Islands.
The Harbour Office is just completing the installation of its new computer system. The Office, the staff at Batson and those on the water now have linked (Samsung) tablets to record movement and payment details. This conveys an air of cool efficiency: even the customers with every imaginable gizmo whistled at it.
It was Merlin Rocket week and the first time the Harbour had been closed for a big dinghy start. Normally dinghies which are racing are excluded from a yellow-buoyed fairway on the west side of the Harbour. But an innovation this year is that, when there are big regattas, the Harbour is closed for about 10-15 minutes to allow the start line to be extended into the fairway. Interestingly, sailing yachts don’t seem to mind waiting at all but some motor boats … well, enough said.
With blue skies and 100 or so Merlins showing off their colourful spinnakers, it could have been a quiet afternoon. But then the lifeboats’ warning siren went off: a kayaker was missing off Beesands. The first sign that something is about to happen is small ribs going at full-tilt towards Batson – an apparent sudden defiance of the speed limit. This is the crew mustering and you need about a dozen people if, unusually, both the inshore and the all-weather are being launched.
The Harbour staff have about 5 minutes to clear the route past Whitestrand. It’s easy enough to warn the people who are already there. The tricky bit is trying to anticipate when someone, blissfully unaware of what’s going on, is going to launch a rubber duck into the path of a fast-moving lifeboat. For they go out fast: the inshore lifeboat will be at around 20 knots when it passes Whitestrand and 35 knots when it has turned the bend. The £3.5m Tamar still moves quite swiftly but doesn’t get to full speed until it has passed the Salcombe Yacht Club start line, when you hear that unmistakeable roar.
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