All at Sea 1 Coast

GULLS CRY

WAVES CRASH

This is Coast.

You never master the sea, but you can work with her.

Rope and canvas can...

can take you anywhere.

Every voyage...

is an adventure.

Now, the Coast crew are casting off.

While I soak up the drama of competition on the waves,

historians Ruth Goodman and Nick Hewitt

relive the sea's darker days,

when our briny depths concealed weapons of war.

There was a time when British waters were infested with German mines.

This is a Soviet Foxtrot submarine.

So, if the Cold War had gone hot,

they planned to swamp the North Atlantic

with hundreds of these boats.

And I'm eating up the opposition in the toughest race of my life.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable!

On this journey, we're all at sea.

I'm embarking on a circumnavigation.

Not of the globe, but the Isle of Wight.

This stepping stone in the Channel

is the perfect base for adventures all at sea.

The island's world-class sailing has a right royal reputation.

King Edward VII became Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron

while he was the Prince of Wales.

Edward's mother, the Queen,

had fallen in love with the Isle of Wight.

"It's impossible to imagine a prettier spot."

That's a quote from Queen Victoria.

She and her husband, Albert, were so taken with this pretty spot,

they bought the land

and built themselves a summerhouse.

Built in 1851 in the Italian style,

Osborne House was the royals' holiday home,

where Prince Edward got his taste for competitive sailing.

And that's why I've come.

I'm told his mother's regal residence

affords majestic views over the Solent,

where my own sailing challenge awaits.

That's the Solent,

the stretch of water between the island and the mainland.

Very shortly, I'm going to be down there in a 40-foot yacht,

taking part in the Round the Island Race.

It's enormous. There are 1,600 yachts taking part.

And unusually, amateurs can race against professionals.

I'm very much in the amateur camp.

I'm nervous and I'm excited.

# Sailing

# Sailing. #

For over 80 years, on the last Saturday in June,

crews have braced themselves for a test of skill and strategy.

Racing around the Isle of Wight, boats must battle each other

and notoriously tricky waters.

The course is strewn with navigational hazards.

One of the first are The Needles, on the western point of the island.

A jagged reef of rock protruding into the course.

Right at the end, there's a submerged wreck you've got to avoid.

Then it's down to the southern tip of the island,

Saint Catherine's Point,

where the waters get very churned up.

So much so that they've ruined many a racer's chance of finishing.

Then it's around the eastern end of the island,

and then, just as you're entering

what you might think is the final straight,

you've got to avoid a sandbank,

Ryde Sands here, before coming up here to finish at Cowes.

And then, there's the sea itself.

It's a complex puzzle of tides and currents

buffeted by unpredictable winds.

Rocks, wrecks and ripping currents

make the Isle of Wight a stupendous sailing challenge.

With the race less than 24 hours away,

I'm starting to realise what it means to feel all at sea.

For me, taking the helm's a daunting prospect.

But all around our shores, dazzling displays of seamanship

are part of the day's work for hard-grafting skippers.

From little coastal craft to ocean-going giants,

boats buoy us up with the trade we desperately need.

One third of all our food floats into Britain.

Strangle our shipping and we'd soon be on our knees,

as our enemies have always recognised.

FOGHORN

Remarkable evidence of attempts to sink our sea trade

survive in the Medway Estuary.

Naval historian Nick Hewitt is stalking fearsome prey.

I'm here to track down weapons of war.

This is a tale of two submarines.

After the Great War ended in 1918,

German subs were beached and sold for scrap.

A few escaped that ignominious fate.

Now, after years studying them,

I've got a chance to explore one of those U-boats.

Not in a museum, but buried in The Medway mud.

CHORAL SINGING

That is absolutely amazing.

Sitting here for 100 years.

So, I never thought I'd get the chance to touch one of these.

And that's still pretty impressively intact, the steel plate.

It's hard to imagine now,

because it's just sitting here, and it looks so decayed

and quiet and peaceful, in a funny sort of way,

but these things were such a menace.

The Germans started their unrestricted

submarine warfare campaign in February 1917,

and within the first three months, they'd sunk 500 ships.

Suddenly, in 1917,

Britain seemed on the brink of losing the First World War.

Not on land, but at sea.

Only putting cargo ships into heavily protected convoys saved us.

Still, by the war's end,

over 3,000 Allied ships had been sunk by U-boats.

This great big hole here, I'm pretty sure this is

where they would have cut out the conning tower.

When the submarines were handed over

to civilian scrap merchants, they had to be demilitarised,

which involved removing the conning towers,

removing the torpedo tubes, obviously,

so that it was completely harmless.

I'm standing on a U-boat! Ha-ha!

We saw off these subs, but their strategy to strangle Britain

lived on into the Cold War.

MUSIC: State Anthem Of The USSR

This Foxtrot-class submarine was built in the 1960s.

Now, she's being restored

to preserve a forgotten threat from the Soviet Union.

They planned to swamp the North Atlantic

with hundreds of these boats.

What was life like for submariners preparing to wage war on our isles?

This is something else.

Officer's accommodation.

It may not look like much, but actually, in terms of habitability,

these things were streets ahead of the German U-boat we saw earlier.

At least there's some degree of privacy.

And what you've got in here is the sonar fit,

the famous ping of the submarine movies.

REPEATED PINGING

So that's the galley, the kitchen.

I can't believe that all the food for 74 men

was prepared in that tiny space.

I've always wanted to do that. Ha-ha!

And this is the nerve centre of the boat.

All these bewildering instruments.

This is where the boat was fought from, steered from.

Everything ran from here.

Wow!

This is what Hollywood has trained us to expect from submarines, isn't it?

You can just imagine if the Cold War had gone hot,

the Soviet submarine commander sitting here,

his boat deathly quiet around him,

all his men waiting for his orders,

as he peers through his periscope,

looking at a big fat merchant ship, about to give the order to fire.

FAINT RADIO

These subs have taken me back to a time

when Britain faced down formidable foes,

hidden beneath the waves.

It may seem like the dim and distant past now,

but when you consider some 90% of British trade

still takes place by sea,

it's suddenly a very clear and present threat.

It's no pleasure cruise being all at sea

when you're trawling for your life.

An undercurrent of peril is ever present.

Never more so than for trawler men landing their deadliest catch

during the Second World War at Milford Haven.

Ruth's discovering how unsung heroes

foiled an enemy threat hidden in our seas.

There was a time when British waters were infested with German mines.

In 1940, Luftwaffe bombers and the German Navy

were dropping mines into our harbours

under the cover of darkness.

Ships were being lost at an alarming rate.

The deadly mines threatened to sink Britain.

Then, unlikely saviours sailed in from the Netherlands.

Dutch trawler men were bringing their fishing boats to Britain

to take on the Germans.

Some 600 fishermen made for our coast in May 1940,

after Hitler attacked the Low Countries.

-RADIO:

-'This is the BBC Home Service.

'The German Army invaded Holland and Belgium

'early this morning by land

'and by landings from parachutes.'

Before the Nazis reached the ports,

the Dutch fishing fleet fled to Britain.

One of those fishermen was Antoon van Gils.

Now, his son Johan has returned to Milford Haven.

It's more than 70 years ago

since your father came along here into the harbour.

It was safer than home here, but it wasn't exactly that safe.

-He came here to fight.

-Yes.

Using their trawlers, the Dutch exiles

were assigned by the Navy to minesweeping duty -

a deadly job that they had to learn quickly or die trying.

How did the Dutch fishermen use their knowledge of the sea

to fight for their land?

Nick Hewitt is back to give me some naval know-how.

What was it about the Dutch fishermen

that offered so much for minesweeping?

The techniques used in sweeping mines

are actually very, very similar to fishing.

The skills that they need,

the way of driving a boat is exactly the same.

And also, their boats are uniquely suited to it.

You could just literally take the trawling gear off the back

and put the minesweeping gear on instead.

Is this what we're talking about?

This is it, this is a contact mine.

They're deployed off the back of a ship with a weight at the bottom called the sinker.

Takes it down to the bottom of the sea.

Cable plays out

and then the mine is set to hold

just below the surface of the water.

A ship comes along, the bow wave pushes the mine out of the way,

and then it pendulums back against the side of the ship

and explodes.

So, how exactly does the minesweeping work?

What they did was, if you have a look at this drawing here,

you have your minesweeper,

you have a long cable called the sweep wire

that comes out from the back of it and is attached to a float.

That's so that the wire goes out

to the side of the boat and not behind it.

The wire's serrated. It cuts through the cable

that's holding the mine to the bottom of the water.

The mine then bobs up to the surface. It's very simple then.

They shoot the prongs with rifles and blow it up.

Minesweeping was fraught with danger.

But Dutch sailors also landed a much happier catch.

Romantic entanglements weren't uncommon...

..as Welshman Graham van Wert can testify.

His father was stationed up the coast at Holyhead.

Graham's meeting Johan to share stories

of what their Dutch dads did in Wales during the war.

THEY SPEAK DUTCH

That's a photo of my...my father.

-Young man in a Dutch uniform.

-A Dutch uniform, yes.

Oh, and there's yours, as well!

This is my father.

-Also in his Dutch naval uniform.

-Yeah.

It's been reported that there was over 105 marriages in Holyhead

between local girls and Dutchmen.

Which...surprised me, because I didn't realise there were so many.

It was quite a culture shock for the local people,

because they hadn't seen foreigners like this before.

And you have this influx of, as I was told,

handsome, but rather on the wild side Dutchmen.

And...the population thought a lot of them

and brought them into their own homes.

Graham's father was one of many to tie the knot with a local girl.

But Johan's father was already married.

His wife stowed away with the fishing fleet.

You were born here?

I'm born here, yes.

LAUGHTER

So, you were here as a Welshman for the first few years of your life.

Yeah, yeah.

The bonds of love forged between foreign lands

were often torn apart in the cruel seas.

The mines were indiscriminate killers.

Scientist Ewen McLaughlin

knows the secret of how contact mines are triggered.

If this was a real mine,

this would be the mine casing, the outer steel shell of it.

Tucked in here, an enormous amount of explosives would reside.

-ARCHIVE:

-And inside is a load of mischief.

Maybe you'd like to examine this interesting toy in detail.

This is the Hertz horn itself, which is made of lead.

You need to give it quite a clout, but that will bend.

When the horn is bent, the trouble starts.

The whole of the intricate mechanism of the mine is set in motion.

And inside, this is a glass vial, which would have acid in it.

So, if anything hits that, that will crack

and that will deposit all this acid into the electrodes underneath.

The breaking of the glass container causes a solution to flow

over the battery plates towards the electric detonator.

It generates almost two volts and quite a hefty current.

That's quite good for setting off a detonator circuit.

I thought you'd prefer a small light to having the explosives.

Can we smash it?

-LAUGHTER

-I'll give it a go.

# But now I've joined the Navy aboard a man-o-war... #

A trawler had a fighting chance of avoiding contact with a mine.

The boats' shallow draft

meant they could glide over the submerged threat,

if they were lucky.

# Don't haul on the rope Don't climb up the mast

# If you see a sailing ship It might be your last

# Just get your civvies ready for another run ashore

# A sailor ain't a sailor ain't a sailor any more. #

So, it must have been dangerous here.

One trawler that never made it home was the Caroline.

On the 28th of April, 1941, she struck a mine in the Haven.

All of the 15 Dutch crew were killed.

Come on, guys, we're just coming up to the wreck now.

The wrecked trawler is a poignant sight for Johan.

Today, Johan and Graham pay their respects

to those who risked their lives to keep our shipping safe.

Their fathers survived,

but thousands of their Dutch and Allied comrades did not.

These were young men, stripped from their homeland by war,

using those skills in seamanship they had at their fingertips

to save ultimately their own land and ours.

We're all at sea.

And for one weekend in June,

there's nowhere more exciting to sail than the Isle of Wight.

I'm pretty nervous. This is my first ever sailing race.

And for reasons I'm beginning to wonder about,

I seem to have chosen one of the most challenging in the world.

It's going to be a really big test.

I'll be crewing on the yacht Ortac.

Our skipper is Richard Webley.

Competition will be fierce.

One of Richard's biggest rivals is Tom Farnworth on Nereus.

We've got two competing skippers here.

Richard and Tom, adjacent boats.

You're pretty equally balanced in terms of your boats.

Yeah, very equally balanced.

-It's all down to crew, skipper and tactics.

-Yeah.

-Who's got the upper hand?

-Tom's got more experience of the race,

but I've got the best crew.

LAUGHTER

-There's only one way to find out.

-There's only one way to find out.

Richard thinks we have the best crew.

A crew which includes me.

I've got a lot to live up to today.

We're now out on the water, moving off towards the start line.

There are boats absolutely everywhere.

-Must be just a few seconds, five or six seconds.

-No! Wait for it!

CANNON FIRE

That's the start! We're off!

Really good blow, helicopter hovering overhead.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable!

The first leg of the race

runs southwest from Cowes to The Needles.

The start is chaos,

every yacht competing for water, wind and tide.

It's a case of getting out quick and avoiding collisions.

That was my first hands-on, proper tack, and I didn't muck it up!

Breaking free of the pack, we've stolen a march on our rivals.

Yes! LAUGHTER

That yacht over there with a blue hull is Tom.

We're about that far ahead of him.

That's how close it is!

We're doing well, but obstacles await -

The Needles and the wreck submerged just beyond.

Sail close and you shave off valuable seconds, but it's a gamble.

We've cut it a little bit fine.

But we didn't run aground.

-And now, we can get ready to bear away to St Catherine's Point.

-Big wave!

-Wave!

Richard's nifty turn around The Needles

keeps us in front of our rivals on Nereus.

We had a reasonably good start.

We were ahead of Ortac for the first half of the windward leg,

and then Ortac seemed to overtake us,

and we've lost them somewhere over there.

Our next gamble is to come wide.

Further offshore, the winds should be stronger.

But it means battling against stronger currents.

I'm at the helm, trying to follow Richard's plan.

At the moment, we're right on the outside of the fleet.

We are. Most of the people have gone shallow.

We're on the outside, doing a straight line.

As with all these things, it's a compromise,

and we'll see how it pays off when we finish.

We're making for the exposed headland of St Catherine's Point.

Then we'll have the strong south-westerly blowing behind us.

It's a key turning point.

An opportunity to race harder.

What we've decided to do is to put a bigger sail up, the spinnaker,

as we go around the point

to give us extra speed down to the eastern end of the island.

Spinnakers catch huge amounts of wind, boosting speed.

But they're risky.

The sails are unwieldy and can destabilise the boat.

I'm manning the spinnaker rope.

Another of my big moments. I've not done this before in my life.

-Ease that sheet.

-It's eased, it's eased.

Get that sheet over there, through there and up to that winch!

It's caught around that block!

One of the ropes is stuck. We can't rein in the sail.

I'm ready! You're ticking in?

The handle has come off!

The boat keeps going over, or broaching.

On the right-hand side of you!

We had trouble getting the spinnaker up, we just broached three times.

It's gone right under.

One on the left. The green one!

-We're trying to regain control of the yacht.

-I need you now!

-Nick!

-Sorry, you're going to have to stop.

-I need you now! Can you get that...

-'No time for talking.'

That's on the...on the winch.

We have to free the rope, get the spinnaker down,

or our race is over.

OK. Ease! More, more quicker.

Yeah. More turns off. Two turns on. Yeah, ease quicker.

Let it go! Can you help get it down the hatch?

Get it in! Quick!

Is it up? Is it running?

Yeah, it's running, it's running, it's running.

-Well done, guys!

-OK.

Right, spinnaker's down.

HE SIGHS

Big, big drama.

Well done, guys! Good job!

Our troubles with the spinnaker have cost us dear

and allowed our rivals, skippered by Tom, to overtake.

But we're still in with a shout.

I've got a feeling the adventure isn't over yet.

# Sailing

# Sailing

# Sailing

# Sailing

# Would you believe it?

# I'm sailing... #

We've been at sea six and a half hours,

one of 1,600 yachts competing in the Round the Island Race.

Among the competitors, there's one rival yacht, Nereus,

that we're determined to beat.

After the turn at St Catherine's point,

we've rounded the eastern tip,

approaching the home stretch to Cowes.

Nereus is just ten minutes ahead.

Now, the whole fleet is funnelling down for a sprint finish.

Our skipper's Richard Webley.

So, it's just a drag race. Who can sail the fastest

in the cleanest air to get to the forks,

and then it becomes a fight up to the finish.

We aren't just battling other boats.

We're also fighting the full force of wind and tide,

straining hard on the rudder to steer true.

There's one last hazard to surmount.

Ryde Sands lie just beneath the waves,

waiting to scupper any yacht tempted to take a short cut home.

To avoid the sandbank, we keep one eye on the depth gauge

and the other on our rivals.

But there's one threat we're not looking out for.

We've lost rudder!

The rudder linkage has snapped.

The sails take over steering.

We're not just helpless, we're dangerous.

We've lost rudder!

We've lost rudder! Clear off!

A missile guided by the wind.

We need to get that under control! Let's just try and bundle that up.

Can we get the main in, please?

If you've got any control,

if you just steer us out of this line of boats.

Big drama! Lost a rudder,

which is about as serious as things can get

when you're sailing pretty quickly in a big boat.

And so, er...

really effective teamwork getting the sails down rapidly.

All our efforts blown out of the water

by a single mechanical failure.

Our race is run.

So near...so far.

We're travelling back to Cowes under motor without a sail.

Ahead of us, yachts cross the finishing line,

including our rivals on Nereus, skippered by Tom,

who came home in a time of 7 hours 56 minutes.

Champagne for some.

But for our brave team, the ending is a little less glamorous.

We were sailing so well.

We were ahead of many boats that should have been faster than us.

The tactics that Richard adopted were brilliant.

Then, in the home straight, the rudder broke.

Richard's steering us back with a pair of rusty bicycle handlebars.

Contests come and go, but the restless sea is eternal.

We competed against the best,

but ultimately, our destiny was decided by a greater power.

It's wonderful, it's unpredictable

and sometimes it's cruel

but the sea's siren call tempts each generation anew.

The one thing that all of us as islanders can share

is the temperamental, seductive sea.