Sailing again!

At long last, the river is back open and we can sail!!

It seemed like such a long time ago that we had the sails out and we were a little nervous about if we would be able to remember how to do it.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have managed to get out of the marina twice: to remember and practise.

We have visited some familiar places (the River Stour, the River Blackwater and the Wallet) and then also tried out some new ones (Walton Backwaters, the River Crouch). This gave us a good balance of navigating and sailing in areas we knew, but then having to passage plan for new areas. To do this, we needed to check out the charts, pilot guides and tide timetables. These all gave us the information we needed to plan our routes and anchorages.

Some of the navigating was more challenging as the water depth meant that some of the places were only accessible at certain times of the tide.

The weather was generally good to us, with winds of up to 20 knots blowing us along. We did have a rather brisk sail on Saturday though when the wind was blowing at 20 to 25 knots with gusts of up to 28. This, along with a swell of 2m, meant that that the boat got a good soaking!

We didn’t take pictures of our ‘brisk’ sail, but we did manage a short video at gusting 18 knots. Hope the quality is ok as we had to seriously reduce resolution and length to load it to the website!

We had a great couple of days. There were some nervous moments and several challenges with equipment problems, but at the end of the day, once the anchor was dropped, we sat and soaked up the view from our back door!