Roughing it to Bilbao!

Oh. My. God. Well we’ve certainly started in appropriate slow style, if not necessarily the manner in which we’d like to go on! On check-in at the continental ferry terminal in Portsmouth we were handed a piece of paper apologising for the delayed departure (by 3 hours) of our sailing due to the late arrival of the vessel as a result of rough conditions en route. The letter also stated that we could expect an ‘uncomfortable’ experience. They were not wrong.

As we left Portsmouth the combination of an extreme high tide and the gusting gale force 10 winds were already contriving to send waves breaking over the harbour wall. Despite the “Pride of Bilbao’ weighing in at a cool 37,500 tonnes and being nearly 180m long we were soon pitching to and fro like the proverbial cork. The swell was 6-8m high by the time we got to the Western reaches of the Channel and it didn’t let up from there on in. Queasy is not the word…

The ‘cruise’ is supposed to take about 36 hours but rather than the storm passing, it intensified climbing to hurricane status by Wednesday, closing the Port of Bilbao (2 ships there broke their moorings and were rather hazardously free floating in the harbour) and leaving us and another 8 or 9 ships offshore to ‘ride out the storm’.

This is a slight euphemism, as what it actually entails is turning the ship head to wind and riding bow first into the incoming swell. This is not so much ‘riding out the storm’ as ‘riding the storm’ – pitching and rolling in the most mountainous seas it’s ever been my somewhat dubious pleasure to experience. The size of the bloody ship means you crank up the face of one huge wave, lifting the prow high into the air and creating the sensation that you have suddenly either dramatically increased in weight or someone has turned up the force of gravity a couple of notches. Then as the mid section passes the peak, the bow plunges down into the trough between waves (and your stomach tries its best to climb up your throat creating that feeling of weightlessness usually associated with going over a humpback bridge too fast in a car).

Of course this motion is entirely dependent on the gap between waves being sufficient to allow the bow to descend into the trough. Every few minutes the front of the ship would instead simply plough directly into the face of the next wave with an enormous crumping thud as several thousand tonnes of metal hits several thousand tonnes of cold Atlantic swell, sending reverberations back through the whole boat. Add to this the skewing movement created by being slightly side-swiped by a wave and the constant buffeting of winds gusting at over 90mph and it’s a recipe for violent seasickness (Fi’s lot) and a combination of nervousness and dread that we are actually going to die (mainly me). The fact that it was also the 20th anniversary of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster (which Fi sensitively pointed out) didn’t exactly help our sense of optimism.

To take your mind off the motion in the ocean you could join your fellow passengers (the fat, boozy, chainsmoking, tattooed and greying cream of UK chavvery) in the ‘Silverstones’ bar - which is probably Delboy Trotter’s idea of a slightly tacky night out. Other distractions included shouting ‘calm down’ in a Scouse accent at the violent sea, staggering round and round the ship clenching the handrails for dear life or just lying flat out in the cabin groaning softly and wishing it all to end…sometimes death seems a softer option. Either that or the P&O players cabaret, a tribute to the musical Grease called ‘Summer Loving’ (somewhat seasonally inappropriate considering the turbulent weather we were experiencing). They deserved medals just for being able to keep their feet during the violent juddering of the ship (the hand jive has never seemed such a sensible dance move).

After 3 nights of adolescent teenage boy’s maritime fantasy (extended tossing at sea) we finally docked in Bilbao a mere 24 hours late. Unbeknownst to us our fate had clearly become a local media event as we were met by a gaggle of Spanish journalists. Clearly mistaking me for a Spaniard (sometimes the beard has its uses) they jabbed microphones into my face, obviously asking (in Spanish of course) what I’d thought of the journey, whether I would ever get on the Pride of Bilbao again etc. I could only shrug my shoulders, smile and say ‘Of course, it was a little rough, but that is all part of the fun’. It’s amazing how quickly you regain your chutzpah once your feet are safely planted back on terra firma.

Overall I blame my Dad. On seeing us off at Waterloo on Monday he’d wished us well on the trip. “I went through the Bay of Biscay once in a Force 10” he quipped, “it was bloody awful”. Dad me old China, I can only concur!