A Truly Epic Journey!

The accolade for furthest-travelled SYC yacht in one voyage has to go to Peter Schranz on Tela!

 

Tela is a 26ft Sadler, a good-looking, seaworthy boat sailed by an enterprising and supremely competent skipper. His journey started last year, crossing the channel in order to transit the French canals down to the Mediterranean. The dry weather last year, however, led to the closure of many of the French canals and frustrated his plans.

Undeterred, he left Tela to overwinter near Paris and resumed the journey in March this year. He completed the voyage through the canals and the rivers, aided by his wife Anne whose skills in managing hundreds (!) of locks of a variety of designs developed very quickly.

 

In the Med Tela became a yacht again and Peter sailed singlehanded along the coasts of France and Italy and circumnavigated Corsica before returning to Port St Louis near Marseilles where the mast was unstepped for a passage through the Canal du Midi, again joined by the now experienced crew, Anne, and exiting into the Bay of Biscay at Bordeaux.

The mast stepped, Peter then sailed Tela, singlehanded once again, up the French coast and back round to Guernsey from where he made the final crossing back to the UK, arriving in the Exe on Sunday 27th August.

 

Inevitably, on a trip of such scale and variable environments, he faced many challenges along the way but always found solutions using his skills honed as a medic - diagnosing, treating and resolving the issues. So much planning went into every day’s passage. Many of us have followed his journeys on WhatsApp and the sailing app SailTies, but he will give us all more insights into the epic trip when he presents a talk at the Club, at a future date which we will publish on the website.

 

 

 

Images for this article by Derek Hathaway and Richard Fryer