The weekend before last, the Bank Holiday here in the UK was unusual. Unusual in the fact that it remained bright and sunny without the hint of rain, the unfortunate side effect was that there was little to no wind either. Skipper popped down and hoisted Thor Junior, aired it, and repacked it, it was not a day to go sailing.
This weekend though was different, oddly the sun still shone, but the wind that was expected to be light blew at around 15-12 kts from the Southwest and so no Thor Junior as expected but a single reef as I set off towards Beaulieu. Tide assisted we were doing around 8.0kts, which meant that the log was under-reading by about a third. Three tacks later and we were approaching the bouys outside of Yarmouth were we going to stop? No, I was turned through the wind and the main eased out and headed over to the Northern bank, New Forest side, with the jib being in the reefed mains wind shadow, skip wound it in.
With my Autohelm locked on, my crew settled down to a lunch of hot dogs on much flatter cockpit. As they ate, they sat and watched others with full main and jib bear away to fill their jibs only to be taken into the main current and adversely affected the result was to drift back. In fact, I was happily catching and passing quite a few as my crew kept me over to the shallower side by short gybing me back and forth. This we did until we passed Beaulieu when the tide was slack and turned, allowing us to cross the main channel without such penalty.
On coming into the entrance of the Medina a tuck with another attached the side greeted us and we barely had room on the Western side of the channel to allow it to pass. Also, the chain ferry sticks out a long way at low water and forced us quite away over to the Eastern bank. On arrival at our pontoon after a cracking day, skip opted to reverse in as the wind was the stronger of the two elements.
A cracking day!
