Late on Tuesday evening we moored alongside the quay in Torquay after what was in every sense a very long sailing trip. Fatigue marked the crew’s faces and they worked quietly and with concentration to make the ship ready and transfer the baggage to the recently closed surfboard shop. Most of them threw themselves into the shop area, while the rest occupied the back room. A few hours later things were quiet. Well, no, not quite. When the crew is asleep, the snores rumble.
The anchor watch fell to midships, where most chose to sleep under the ship’s tent on board the Sea Stallion with rolling watch reliefs.
The wind and rain came as promised during the night and on Wednesday morning porridge was eaten in pouring rain and a strong southerly wind. This weather continued throughout the day and it was not until nine in the evening that the wind dropped and the rain stopped.
So people took shelter in the many coffee bars in Torquay, a town with much to tell, a comparatively large town with about 65,000 inhabitants, which grows to about 200,000 in the summer season. And it looks as though it is mainly tourists in their third age who visit the town. Known for its mild and healthy climate, the town has been visited by elderly people every summer for a couple of hundred years. Today, however, there was not much in the way of health and warmth...
A number of sequences in Monty Python’s Flying Circus were filmed in and around Torquay. While the Pythons were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in 1971, the hotel’s owner threw Eric Idle’s suitcase out of the window because he thought it was a bomb. John Cleese later described the owner as “the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met”. The TV series Fawlty Towers, with its owner, Basil, was born.