This weekend we’ve been enjoying WeatherWitch’s happy place. She loves flat seas and a good F4 on the beam (or broad reach with the asymmetric spinnaker), which was exactly what we had for the entire weekend.
Saturday we headed to Lymington, managing a lot fewer tacks than we had expected. We really felt the speed increase thanks to our recent scrub and took full advantage of the perfect conditions to give our big headsail (145 % genoa) a good test.
Around Bramble Bank we had a close encounter with a cargo ship claiming to be “a cleaner future for shipping”… it was certainly quite a view. We weren’t quite sure why our helm at the time seemed to keep suggesting we tacked in its direction 😛
Despite having a couple of friends joining us, Mike accidentally touched some ropes and winch handles. Much to his surprise, this resulted in WeatherWitch going even faster…so much so that he had to sit down for a while to recover:
After a spot of turning round to go against the tide for more sailing as none of us were ready to stop, we headed in to Lymington to enjoy the remaining sunshine with a drink or two…or possibly more.
Having had enough coffee, bacon and eggs to rejuvenate us the next morning we headed back out to the Solent for what turned out to be an even faster day – boat zoomies coming right up!
The weather was absolutely perfect for playing with our asymmetric spinnaker 😀 :-D, and with our speed log now both working and approximately calibrated we worked out that we probably neared or reached max hull speed.
Cue quite a “diversion” towards Portsmouth instead of heading back to Hamble straight away. We even managed our first spinnaker gybe, so a great success all round.
