Our week away onboard WeatherWitch started the way many sailing trips do, staring at a pile of bags wondering how they will all fit into the car to get down to the boat. We always seemed to believe that having our own boat will mean less to constantly take to and from the boat as you leave more onboard, but far from it!! There is always a headsail to change, a serviced liferaft to drop back or the new mooring lines to take. Luckily years of kayaking trip mean that car tetris became part of life at an early age and soon our home for the week was refilled!
The old saying of time and tide wait for no man always seems the most true at the beginning of a trip when you are “fresh” from work so with what time was left of the day we moved to a mooring buoy off Yarmouth ready for an early start across Poole Bay. A calm Solent under a golden sunset helped all relax into life back onboard and at least for a time helped ignore the planned early start.
The next morning, we slipped around 0400 to head to Portland, eyeing up the wind angle for the following day across channel. This time with crew onboard, we got to introduce them to one of the pleasures of sailing outside the Solent, with a visit (albeit fleeting) from dolphins. Much though it is not always something I would agree with when waking up, early starts and arrival by lunchtime has always been a style of sailing I have liked. You get some sailing in whilst the waters are quiet and then an afternoon to explore ashore… in this case through a pub lunch at The Cove, with fantastic views over Chesil Beach and Lyme Bay.
The challenge of early departures is always functioning after just rolling out of bed. You don’t want to set an alarm any earlier than 0345…but equally the first thing you have to do is manoeuvre around the marina. Worst of all you have to do this pre-coffee!! So, under the circumstances there was only one thing to do…. get Miranda to drive!
