ONE OF THE 1999 ADVENTURES OF 'KES' It was September 17th and a really glorious day for a sail. I readied my yacht "KES" for sea. She is a 28ft - 34ft with bowsprit; Van de Stadt Kesterloo design, steel cutter rigged yawl that I have owned since June. Moving up from a 22ft Tyler she was very different to sail, plus I had an extra foresail and an extra mast to play with. Everything was going well, I was sailing single handed as usual, I slipped my pontoon mooring in Hartlepool's prestigious marina and headed for the lock after calling the lock office for a seaward lock. Everything was going well and I entered the lock in textbook style. I came alongside the pontoon, (luckily I was the only vessel in the lock) I put her into reverse to kick the stern in, I stepped off with my lines ready ~ then all hell broke loose. Kes accelerated ahead I tried to secure her with at least one line on a cleat, but all I successfully did was to be dragged along the pontoon on my knees and take all the skin off my left hand as the rope was pulled through it. A 13 stone man can't hold an accelerating 5 ton boat. I was either going to end up in the water or worse so I let her go. Kes then proceeded to circumnavigate the lock, which is about 15 metres wide. She came back past me doing her cruising speed of about 6 knots but was too far away for me to jump on, and I was still in slight shock. She was on her seventh lap and she was getting ever closer to the North wall of the lock and further away from me. Would she continue going until she ran out of fuel? A quick calculation was that she would run out in 2 to 3 days, or would she just destroy herself on the stone wall and steel gate. Panic and a lot of shouting - would that help? I think not. She was starting her eighth lap of the lock and it certainly looked as though on the next circuit she would crash into the wall. Just when all looked lost, a guy that I didn't know from Adam leapt off the North wall onto her roller reefed foresail, slid down onto the deck, stopped the engine and steered her round once more to lose way. Then she glided up to the pontoon with out a scratch on her gleaming black hull. I discovered that the gear cable on the morse control had come adrift giving me only forward gear but also increasing the revs when I thought it was in neutral. I always enter any mooring, marina, or pontoon with extreme caution and in eighteen years of sailing have never had a problem like that. Over the years I have sailed on fast boats slow boats, pretty boats, ugly boats some pretty ugly boats, lucky boats, and unlucky boats. A famous yachtsman once said that he thought it much more important to be lucky in life than to be skilful. Then surely to own a lucky boat is something really special, and I really feel that I am the proud owner of one such boat. Mike Fellows. Read more of Mike's sailing adventures in 'I'm a Sailor Get Me Out of Here' Click here to order your copy. Comment on this story

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So, was you Mike's mystery hero? We'd love to hear the story from you if you were.

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