Answered Prayer #3692
One night in 1985, my wife and I were sailing a chartered 27-foot yacht from the Isles of Scilly to Falmouth. The wind was against us, blowing force six, and we had two seasick crew. In strong winds, steering is hard work. My wife was expecting, so she stayed down below and I helmed from 11pm when the seasick crew handed over and went to their bunks. It was before the days of GPS, and the conditions – strong tide, headwind, indeterminate leeway the boat was making, and lack of help – made it impossible to plot our position on the chart and work out an accurate course to steer. It was a very prayerful night. At times, as the wind rose and I worried that something might break, I prayed for the wind to fall and it did. Then as the wind died to extent it was not driving us through the large waves, I prayed for more wind. This happened several times. I knew we were going to have to tack through the wind and sail northwards at some stage, but I could not be sure that we had cleared the notorious Manacle reef. The only answer was to carry on until I was sure we were safe. That meant hours of extra sailing, missing the tide at Falmouth, and being late handing over our yacht. I had resigned myself to this, but at 1.30am I had an overwhelming feeling that we should tack round and steer a course of zero degrees magnetic, due north. I have never navigated on impulse, but was absolutely certain that this was God’s guidance. I tacked onto the new course. At 5am, my wife emerged from the cabin with hot chocolate and ginger biscuits, and noticed the yellow outer Manacles market buoy behind us. We had sailed just a few hundred metres outside it. Then we spotted the lighthouse dead ahead. For the first time ever, I did not need to adjust course as we approached land. We were still steering zero degrees at 6.45am when we sailed through the middle of the Falmouth harbour entrance. We moored at about 7.15am. A man caught our mooring line and said, ‘You’re cutting it a bit fine!’ If we had been just a few minutes later we would have run aground, and we would have had to wait several hours for the tide to come in again!