Picking up fore and aft moorings

Mooring fore and aft can be a fiddly process, never more so than in Cornwall's Polperro. If you can do it here, says Rachael Sprot, then you can do it anywhere

- RACHAEL SPROT

Fancy going to Polperro next weekend?’ I asked my partner Chris on New Year’s Day. ‘We’ve finally got some high pressure coming in.’ I needed to visit Polperro as part of my research for the next edition of the Shell Channel Pilot, but the autumnal Atlantic batterings had been relentless.

‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘I need to try out my new winter sailing outfit.’ Having been instructed to visit the chandlery for his first set of foulies, Chris had, instead, been to the eclectic army surplus store in Plymouth, Bogey Knights, and returned with a two-piece flotation suit made from 3mm neoprene.

‘It only cost £70,’ he declared proudly. It wasn’t quite what I’d envisaged.

On a small-scale chart Polperro barely registers, it’s just a wrinkle in the coastline. The tiny fishing harbour lies at the mouth of the River Pol, its houses clinging limpet-like to the steep-sided valley. Many of the streets are too narrow for cars – tourists are obliged to park out of town and approach on foot. Arriving by boat isn’t much easier: it’s an unwelcoming rocky coastline which is totally exposed to onshore weather.

The inhospitable geography made it an excellent base for smuggling in the 18th and 19th centuries. Frustrated customs officers were forever pursuing casks of gin and crates of tea as they disappeared into the folds of the coast. Smuggling was so rife that the local schoolteacher, fed up with trying to teach maths to a bunch of reprobate sailors, started a bank to launder the villagers’ spoils instead. These days, visitors arriving by boat receive a much warmer welcome than the revenue officers once had, but the harbour is still a daunting place to enter. The imposing slab of Peak Rock, with its underwater extension, The Ranneys, guards the western side of the entrance, and there are rocky outcrops on the eastern side as well.