been caught smuggling

some people really know how to walk a dog with attitude

The instructions were simple enough: to deliver Sea Tramp from the Hamble to Falmouth. The crew were the usual suspects (literally, as it turned out); me, Phil, Jim and Simon. Now, Phil and Jim look like grizzled old sea dogs, so you’d never guess that Phil works in a technical library and Jim runs a garage. Simon and I are younger, but apparently not young enough to look innocent.

The longest leg of the journey is getting across Lyme Bay. We decided to head straight from Weymouth to Brixham in order to spend a more leisurely second half of the week in Devon and Cornwall. We knew that it would take most of the day. What we hadn’t banked on was having a split water tank dumping its entire contents into the bilge while trying to fix a problem with the engine. It wasn’t until 3am that we dropped anchor in the entrance to Brixham harbour.

The next morning we had a lot of work to do. We had to scout out the harbour to see where we could safely take Sea Tramp in to pick up some water. Sea Tramp is 25 tons of ferro-concrete and very hard to manoevre at low speeds, so we had to be careful. We inflated both dingies, fitted them with outboards and Jim and I started making trips in to the harbour.

We had both arrived back on board and were grabbing a coffee when we saw a large orange semi-rigid inflatable approaching at speed from outside the harbour. As it came alongside we could see that it contained four men and a dog. Two men and the dog jumped on board and introduced themselves as Customs & Excise officers.

The Customs men asked us where we had come from and where we were going to. They seemed happy enough with our answers and seemed about to leave when the officer in charge said, “You don’t mind if we let the dog have a run around below, do you? He’s not been off the boat all morning”. All morning? It was only 9.30! All the same, of course we didn’t mind. If you object, you could find your boat alongside the quay with all its contents dumped on shore.

The dog didn’t find anything, so we asked why we had been targeted. The officer was quite happy to explain. We had arrived in the early hours of the morning, anchored offshore and started making lots of trips in to shore at first light. Add that to the fact that we were in a large ketch which made, in his words, “a good sea-going boat”. They were left in complete bemusement as we thought about the previous night’s water and engine trouble and collapsed in laughter.