hot!

Well, we didn't do many miles this weekend, but they were nice ones!After a late arrival Friday night we awoke Sat morning to a beautiful day. The sun was shining and it was pleasantly warm...I fairly immediately set to in getting the new tender set up and onto the davits.... the plan was a couple of hours work, and then we'd get out sailing... As ever, blind optimism was in play, and the 'couple of hours' of work, turned into a bit of a marathon. By the time i'd worked out how to rig the downhaul, boom retention, routed the halyard half a dozen different times, and finally fitted the davit fixings, it was 14:00, and when SWMBO handed me a cold beer, the afternoon had turned into a bit of relaxation exercise....So we sat and chilled out for the remainder of the day..... the evening finished off with a fine curry and two or three more cold beers!Sunday started a little greyer, but still warm, and the sun kept poking through making it really quite nice. By 09:30 we locked out, after a short delay while a dozen Ajax's locked out... Ajaxs are a small engineless keelboat, and we watched without any envy as they paddled furiously to try and get into the lock!Once out at sea, we found 18kts of wind, bang on the nose out of Harwich, so motored into the choppy swell and made our way into Hamford water, where we dropped the hook.We'd motored past all the anchored boats and cautiously nudged our way into the shallowing water until we daredn't go any further on a falling tide, and dropped the hook.... with the anchor down, I engaged reverse, and we gently slid backwards and carried on sliding..... it clearly wasn't going to hold.... so I lifted the anchor back up to find it liberally covered in pipe weed. This weed is the scourge of east coast anchorages.... its tough, slippery and prolific.... and it makes anchoring very hit or miss..... so we motored back through the anchored boats and selected a spot a bit further back down the creek... down went the hook and it set almost immediately.... proves that picking your spot is important. This care was to prove sensible.Now that we were in, we had a few hours to wait for the tide to continue dropping and start rising again. We'd been there an hour when we heard a shout....The small Westerly that had ironically been glaring at us, saying (with their eyes) don't anchor too close when we'd tried the first spot, had dragged.... they were pinned across the bows of another boat, and in a bit of a pickle.... their chains had got mixed up, and one chain was round the keel of the other..... it took them the best part of an hour to sort themselves out.... but fortunately looked to be no damage....Back out the other way to sea, we could see a boat over at 45 degrees.... hard aground.... thankfully it was a neap.... but if was definitely a weekend for calamities!By 15:00 we ruefully pulled up the anchor, and left this peaceful and relaxing anchorage and headed out to sea.... with the wind now behind us, the apparent wind was much lower, so we set the genny and had a very pleasant sail at 5 to 6 kts back into Harwich, where we finally rolled the sail away and locked back in...Not many miles, but with the warm weather, a grand weekend.

Miles logged 12nm
Miles this season 333nm
Miles since this blog started 3,270nm