Practical Boat Owner - June 2018

A

fter a five-year refit, including
a rig-change from ketch to
brigantine schooner (PBO
August 2017), it was time for
Britannia to set sail again.
We chose the Intracoastal Waterway
(ICW), thinking the sheltered waters would
be perfect for a shakedown cruise. What
we didn’t know was that it would be a
shake-up cruise for everyone on board!

Britannia is a Down East 45, built in San

Diego, USA, around 1977. She measures

13.7m (45ft) on deck plus a 1.52m (5ft)

bowsprit – 15.22m (50ft) overall. I refitted

her in a marina near Kennedy Space

Center, Florida. The ICW meanders nearly

3,200km along the whole eastern coast of

America, and is sheltered from the Atlantic

Ocean by a protective wall of outer banks.

From the sea outlet at Fort Worth we

planned to cross the famous Gulf Stream

to the beautiful Bahamas.

‘We’ consisted of myself, my wife Kati,

and my brother Paul, who lives in Australia

and had never sailed on Britannia before,

or on very little else for that matter.

The adventure started early for Paul.

At our home near Orlando, Florida, he

decided to grill some steak on our

‘barbie,’ but when he lifted the lid a

metre-long snake lay asleep on the grill.

I really don’t know why he was so taken

aback; don’t they have snakes on their

barbecues in Australia?

A few days later we slipped out of our

berth on what I thought was a perfect day

and motored out into the Intracoastal

• smack into a sheer wall of pea-soup fog!
  It was so dense I could hardly see the
  bowsprit and decided to hook the first
  mooring-field buoy we bumped into, until
  it cleared.
  Picking up a buoy was new to Paul, who
  hooked the ring instead of the floating line.
  As the 22-tonne boat moved the boathook
  was wrenched from his grasp, gashing his
  finger. Luckily it floated – the pole that is


• and his finger remained attached to his
  hand. We retrieved the boathook, patched
  him up, and put the kettle on.

Inauspicious start

A quarter mile passage is not a very

auspicious start in anyone’s log. Was it a

portent of things to come?

The breeze that eventually cleared the

fog came dead on our nose, so we

motored 28NM south to our first

anchorage at the end of Merritt Island, just

north of Melbourne.

The ability to anchor overnight more or

less anywhere in this protected waterway

Shaken but

not stirred

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Hughes is an
Englishman living
near Orlando, Florida
in the USA. He has
been sailing for nearly
half a century as a
professional captain,
charterer and restorer
of boats. He has just completed a
five-year restoration of his Down
East 45 yacht Britannia.
■ http://www.schooner-britannia.com

An unreliable outboard forced

Roger Hughes to row out an

anchor when Britannia ran

aground on the mud

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Headwinds and hapless crew put

a stop to a cruise on the USA’s

Intracoastal Waterway