Skipper’s View
IN 2022 THE CHALLENGE OF CROSSING THE CHANNEL HAS A NEW ELEMENT: WHAT FORM TO DOWNLOAD BEFORE I GO?
A FEW YEARS BACK, after a particularly hallucinatory singlehanded trip across the English Channel, I decided I wouldn't be making another crossing: the shipping lane, the wild weather, suddenly it all seemed a bit much. However, this month I was tempted back in order to help a friend move a 22' Hillyard to St Valery sur Somme so he could enter the canal system there. I reckoned he could do with a hand given the size of the boat. Anyway, the trip was, both eventful and enjoyable but I'm not here to bore you with tales of this jaunt - perhaps I'll leave that to a later issue. No, my reasons for mentioning it are that I have received a number of letters from confused sailors wondering what on earth they are supposed to do customs-wise now we have left the EU.
Prior to leaving the UK, I too had taken a quick look at what we were supposed to do and began to fully understand reader's concerns. The Cruising Association has clearly spent a good deal of time trying to work it out and their website was instructive, yet the main words that stood out were 'under review'. Ultimately, I gave up and we set sail without filling in a single form. We duly arrived in Fecamp, where everything was closed. We then proceeded to Dieppe, an o cial port of entry, where we presented the boat's papers and ourselves. No extra forms were requested. The explanation for this seems pretty clear to me; the person who dealt with us at Dieppe took the same line as us - that all this is simply too confusing and stupid to bother with. It's bang in line with the general attitude of laissez faire that surrounds many things in France. A pragmatic approach and one that we were most grateful for. The problem is that we left the harbour o ce unsure of ourselves; if we carried on to St Valery were we going to get nobbled by someone less pragmatic and more o cious? Probably not, but the doubt lingered. The plight of leisure sailors is nothing compared to, say, the Northern Ireland Protocol but the manner in which we have been largely overlooked in these political machinations is scandalous and negligent. The English Channel dishes up enough challenges without the further uncertainty of ba ing, unresolved paperwork.