Danske fishing-boat and anchor.
To some it may appear foolhardy to go so far on a small yacht like the one I am speaking of; but as a matter of fact it will be found that it is nearly always the cautious sailor and not the reckless one who succeeds in sailing his little vessel to distant shores. The imprudent and thoughtless man soon encounters such experiences, soon gets into such scrapes, on attempting a foreign cruise as will keep him for the future in the home waters he happens to know something about.
A voyage from England to the uttermost ends of the Baltic does not necessitate any really long runs for a yacht of small draught, and it is seldom that one need remain out at sea at night. It is well that it is so; for these are surely the most wind-vexed waters of Europe; violent north-westers rise in the most unexpected manner, and the stillest of summer mornings will as likely as not be succeeded by a howling wintry afternoon. It behoves the skipper of the small yacht to watch his weather very carefully in this treacherous region. Whenever a run of some distance is before him, from isle to isle, or along some portion of the coast where the havens of refuge are rare, he must patiently wait for a slant, and the advice of the aneroid in the cabin must be implicitly followed.
It is this last precaution that makes what otherwise would certainly be a dangerous cruise for a small craft an amusement less risky than are the majority of sports. It ought to be unnecessary to repeat such trite admonition as this; but in my experience it is the skipper of the small vessel who pays the least attention to his glass; and in all cases that have come under my notice when small yachts that have started to cross the North Sea or the Channel, or to make some other run of a dozen hours or so, have come to grief in any way in consequence of having encountered weather dangerously heavy for them, it is for the one reason that the skipper, possibly an excellent sailor in other respects, has neglected his aneroid. One may indeed make occasional runs in this blind fashion, trusting to the appearance of the sky alone, and yet no harm come of it; but on the sort of Baltic cruise I am describing there will, of course, be a number of such short runs; short, but quite long enough to make disaster a probability sooner or later if proper precautions be not taken, and it may be found that the pitcher has gone to the well once too often.
The life of the man who undertakes long coasting voyages in small craft depends more on his knowledge of the use of the barometer, and on his close observation of it, than it does on his good seamanship. A man I know had his dinghy carried away, and nearly lost his little yacht and his life, on a run from Ryde to Havre. The longshore wiseacres shook their heads when they heard of it, and spoke of the foolhardiness of sailing across Channel in so tiny a vessel. In this I maintain the wiseacres were wrong; the foolhardiness lay in the skipper's blinking at the heavens to windward and lee, and putting absolute faith in their deceptive appearance, while he entirely omitted to see what the glass was doing before he tripped his anchor. It is possible to practically insure for oneself fine weather, or at any rate the absence of dangerously bad weather, for a run of say a day and night, provided one have the patience to wait for it.
Roskilde from the Fiord.
I cannot recall an instance of having experienced really bad weather when my reading of the barometer had told me that it would be fine; but I have seen the weather-wisdom of many an old sea-dog at fault. In the Baltic the fishermen fail signally to read the signs of their own skies, as the following incident will show. I had sailed into a fishing-haven on Zeeland called Gillelie. I found a fête in progress which had detained the fishermen who would otherwise have sailed on that day to the distant island of Anholt for the autumn herring fishery. 'But we will all be off to-morrow,' said one to me. 'I do not think any of you will sail to-morrow or the day after; it will be blowing a gale of wind from the north-west,' I remarked, for my glass had been falling in most ominous fashion for some days. But my friends thought they knew better. 'You are a stranger here,' said they; 'we fishing-folk know the signs of the sky in our country. The wind is south-west, and it will remain fine. The barometer is not to be trusted in the Baltic.' Well, at midnight the wind had shifted to north-west, and was howling through the bending pines; by dawn the gale had burst upon us, for two days it blew a very hurricane, and there was much loss of life and shipping on the Cattegat. Had it not been for the fête the fishermen would have put to sea, and few would ever have been seen again. I converted the fishermen of Gillelie to a belief in the barometer, and I believe that they forthwith applied to the Danish Government for one of those glasses which it supplies to seaports for the public use.
Having given my reasons for recommending a small vessel of light draught for Baltic cruising, I will now explain what I consider that vessel should be like. I am about to preach rank heresy, but I should certainly act up to my preaching were I ever again to make preparations for a similar voyage.