Fishing and drifting..

Oh how I laughed...
not... 😏

Gloriously sunny day (the dog days continue) and with a full diary, and weather fronts coming in over the next few days this was a "grab it while it's here" day on the water..

Lovely row out to the boat to be met with this sight (left) as I got on board... tail off my wind vane sat in the cockpit.. bast*rd birds have clearly tried to roost on it (as they also crapped all over the deck!), and broken the wind vane off - so first job added to the winter list..  thought I'd managed to break the run of bad luck with windex's as this one has lasted at least two years maybe three! 😀

12:22 HT and a 4.2 Mtr tide but although it was stupidly warm and sunny, the biggest issue was wind, or rather the lack of it..  the forecasts had been saying F2 gusting 3, but what we got was an entire Beaufort less with a F1 gusting 2... no matter, I had coffee, a fishing rod, some fuel, and an urge to try a passage out of the moorings that I'd been thinking about trying for ages..

This is it..  normally I come to and from the mooring via the passage at bottom (known as "the ditch".. to me anyway 😀), but there is another passage, north of the bank, that a number of club boats on that side of the moorings tend to use and I've never tried it..  well, until now anyway.

By way of a digression though, back in the day..  1980?? earlier? I learned to windsurf, and the school I went to (run by Peter Williams) was based at the marina there..  we had the school boards roped to the shore (so we couldn't get in to trouble) at the slipway, bottom of picture. At the end of the week as the RYA Part 1/2  examination required us to be able to sail on all points of sail, the final test was to sail round that bank as the instructor told us if we did that then we would have completed the requirement... 😁

Anyway, back to yesterday, no issues with this circumnavigation either. I was mildly surprised at how deep it was, certainly no shallower than the ditch..  most of the time (and this was an hour and a half before high) I was seeing a metre/metre and a half, below the keels (and I have a generous keel offset, set so it was more like 2). 

It was so wind'less, I hoisted main while coming down the channel past the moored boats, and then set off for a slow drift. In the occasional puff we made progress. but it was a tiller pilot and fishing rod kind of a day.

Lovely day out but I was never going to be able to make any progress against the tide in near calm conditions, so I turned and ran back for the mooring on the last legs of the tide..  beer in the cockpit completed a perfect day.

Log:

Distance: 3.98 (cumulative total in the mileage tab at the top)
Wind (Speed; Direction):  F1 gusting F2 ; Between WxS and SSW
Sail Plan: Full main and genoa
Speed (Max/average in knots): 4.2 / 1.6