At the climax of my hypothetical story, a French foreign echange student attempts to get herself back home to France by way of rowboat/sailboat. Why she is doing this is undecided. My question is: Could it be possible for her to accomplish this? To make it more dangerous, she's doing this during a storm. How bad of a storm does the Channel receive? How high are the waves?
By possible, do you mean is it allowed or is it physically doable? If the former, then there are people who do so but I'm not sure if there are any regulations around it. If the latter, well, there are people who even swim the channel...
Yeah, if people can swim it, then I'm sure they can row it. But you'd want to make sure they knew what they were doing. The Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
The English Channel is also a very rough body of water. Not quite as bad is the Irish Sea, but pretty bad. If you don't know why she would be doing it, the question is pretty silly.
People have rowed the Atlantic! Of course they can row the channel. Probably only take them a few hours. To be honest a storm would not brew up that quick in the channel. In Britain you know when the weathers turned because it will stay like that for a few days. If the weather was on the turn you'd know about it. There might be some heavy rain, and thunder/lightning that will happed suddenly in the summer due to convectional heating - but that's not going to bother her too much. PS: Just remembered by mum crossed the channel in a sail boat as a kid (with my grandparents)- and there was a storm. It was pretty sickening - i.e lots of puking, and pretty scary but not deadly. I think she said the waves were about 6/8ft? But the actual choice of words were MASSIVE!
The channel is just 5 km wide at Calais, rowing it is not a problem, perhaps during a storm is dangerous, but since you're the write it's up to you to decide if it's just bad weather or the Storm of the Century.
I'm kinda (<--understatement) a stickler for details, so obviously if its set in the real world, I'm not gonna have the Channel basically act like the waves from Perfect Storm because that never happened. Y'know, I should probably take this idea and reanalyze it. If I can't figure out just why she's going to boat across the Channel to France in a hurry...
It is sometimes possible to see the white cliffs of Dover from France. But it's still 32km. It takes just under an hour on the Ferry. I've made this jouney many times! So I'm very sure.
Sorry, but it seems quite a bizarre and specific point to want your character to row across the English Channel without having any reason for doing so? What makes you so eager to include this in your hypothetical story?
It's just hypothetical. I guess I wanted to put the basic: "College-aged girl solely commanding a sail boat during a horrible thunderstorm" in some kind of adventure/suspense thriller.
Fair enough, it just seemed very specific and I thought you might have planned out some other aspects. It's an interesting idea
It is. I just don't know what to do about it. I do know: #1- She's French. #2- Somehow, for some reason, she's in Dover, Kent, England. Her family is back in Brittany, though. She's possibly on a summer vacation or a foreign-exchange student. #3- ??? #3.5- She meets my self-insert American named John T. Nelson who imparts some plot points for her. He doesn't get involved in the climax and we only see him in one scene in the pub. #4- OMG SAIL THROUGH TEH STORM!!11
