Submitted by Mark on Fri, 17/06/2011 - 15:38

Yesterday afternoon I was out on Paramour with a cameraman and six contestants from the Channel 4 programme "Four in a Bed".

Amelia and Tim who own "Nearwaters" B&B in St. Mawes have been taking part in the programme which features four sets of accomodation providers and their experiences at eachother's establishments. Tim and Amelia kindly suggested to the programme makers that they would like to use me and Paramour for their activity.

We set off from St. Mawes in quite choppy conditions but at least bright sunlight. The original plan had been to head to Black Rock to see the seals basking there. Unfortunately by the time the crew and contestants arrived at the harbour they were nearly two hours late. This meant that by the time we got going Black Rock was well covered by the flooding tide and the seals were long gone! It would have been quite uncomfortable at the rock anyway wallowing around in the rough conditions so we headed at speed over to the lee of Pendennis Point.

Once in the shelter of the land conditions were much calmer and we were able to perform a few passes at speed in front of the camera boat and "pretend" to look for seals for the benefit of the cameras. It was then that Amelia and Tim sprung their surprise on the other contestants by suggesting that they should jump from the boat and swim into the beach with a promise of hot chocolate as an incentive! I already knew this was going to happen and had fitted the contestants with bouyancy aids rather than the automatic lifejackets I keep onboard. This meant that some could keep the buoyancy aids on if they were not competant swimmers.

To give them credit, everyone did the swim, with a certain amount of fuss and theatrics from some! They had their hot chocolate on the beach and I picked them up and sped back across to St. Mawes. I think they all enjoyed it however, it will be interesting to see the programme and hear what they said in their interviews, which were held on the harbour when we got back.

The lovely Emily, one of the producers, will let me know when the programme will be aired. All in all it was a fun afternoon.