SEAFARING is not a word you could readily use to describe me. Come to think of it, I’m not clever in the air, either.

Like many, I feel comfortable only when the floor below me does not wobble like jelly and the horizon remains straight and doesn’t veer up and down.
But an around-Guernsey boat trip, particularly one with an expert guide, has long been a personal ambition as has to see, at close quarters, the most iconic lump of granite I can think of – the Grosse Rocque.

So Barry Paint’s offer of a circumnavigation of our waters was readily accepted and it was only a question of when the weather would be fair enough to set a backdrop for pretty pictures on a spring low.

Photographer Brian Green was also along for the ride on the St Sampson’s pilot boat – once of the Falkland waters – but for the best part of two decades the vehicle used by Barry and his fellow pilots at the island’s northern port to safely accompany the many ships down the Russel and into the harbour.

The sea would have to be flat, too, otherwise poor old Brian’s expensive camera equipment could be lost overboard, along with the man himself.

So after several postponements and with the sun threatening to poke through for a sustained period, off we set through the pierheads.