First trip out alone!

Sunday 7th July…another momentous day. Our first time out of the marina, by ourselves!

We have had Escapade since September 2016 and have only been out of the marina twice. Once was for the sea trails when we bought her and once was in May when we needed to check that the propellor was working properly. On both occasions, we have others with us: Oyster staff for the sea trials and Fox’s marina staff for the prop check. We were only out for a very short time and we were definitely not responsible for steering in and out of the marina!

Sunday 7th was a completely different matter though…just us. Preparation was key. We checked the weather, the wind and the tides. The roles were decided: Martin was definitely skipper and I was crew (whether competent or not was still to be decided) I am not brilliant at visualising things, so Martin made cardboard templates of a boat shape and a fender. Then armed with several pieces of string, showed me which lines to release first and where to put the fender to ensure the boat was protected from the pontoon. (or the pontoon from the boat?)

Then it was time to put it into practise. Several other boat owners were around to help (and several others were watching from a safe distance on the club house decking) but we wanted to see if we could manage it between us. I could write a whole page about reversing a 47 foot boat out of the berth, while avoiding the surrounding boats, but the long and short of it was, Martin was amazing. So calm and in control (on the outside at least) and, if the observers had score cards, it would have been 10 out of 10.

Once out of the marina, it was down the river. Ipswich is on the River Orwell and it can be very shallow in places, especially towards the banks. However, it is also a busy river and a centre channel is dredged regularly. Although we had a yacht, we were lacking sails and had limited electronics/navigation fitted yet. The plan was to motor down and check out the depth gauge and speed log. As long as we kept to between the green and red buoys we would be fine!!

After so long ashore, it felt good to be on the water. Escapade performed beautifully. Martin was a great skipper and I was (fairly) competent as crew. We had a successful two hours on the river, managing to get to Pin Mill and back. We even managed to get the boat back into her berth with no problems. A definite 10/10 all round!!