Dark and wild, bereft of light, What a lookout would call, a filthy night. The mariner fights, a storm in the dark, Hove to and alone, playing the shrinking part. Stepping onto a 72-foot steel yacht in Bodo in Norway to deliver her back to Plymouth, the yacht is the largest in the marina and …
Last weekend we finally got out for our first sail of the season, which feels crazily late for us. The northerly winds did try to kid us into thinking that it was still late February or early March – I was certainly wearing enough layers for it to have been! First stop: a “relaxed” downwind …
This year’s refit was supposedly a smaller and easier refit than last year’s. That was the plan at least… got to love a plan! The good Foot pump serving For most of the time we’ve had WeatherWitch, the foot pump for the salt water has been ineffective at best. We finally found the time to …
As the main sailing season slows down, our thoughts turn towards some of those annual maintenance jobs that we just haven’t quite got around to yet, with servicing the engine being the top of our list. It all started well, with the impellor coming out in (mostly) one piece pretty easily and the new one …
While most sensible people tucked themselves up for inside to let a weekend of highly changeable weather pass them by in the warm and dry, we instead decided to go for a highly sociable…if very wet at times…jaunt from Hamble to Yarmouth. The weekend started on Friday evening with some very moody and still evening …
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 …
WeatherWitch has been in the water for 18 months as we’ve wanted to be able to take advantage of a great sailing day whenever in the year. This has resulted in many great days out on the water, but also has given the Hamble algae, shellfish and seaweed plenty of opportunity to give our copper …
Previously we chatted about removing our 2 big, rather crazed, Goiot hatches to get them refurbished after the success with our little hatches in the winter. The turn around times for getting the refurb done were much quicker in the summer (hence doing it now) so now we have the excitement of refitting our lovely, …
Today we had an exciting, and as it turned out very wet to begin with, day out watching the start of the Ocean Globe Race off Cowes. The Ocean Globe Race is being run in celebration of 50 years since the inaugural Whitbread Race (in 1973) and will be following the same route. It is …
When we got WeatherWitch, all of her hatches were watertight but heavily crazed, which reduces the strength of the acrylic. As such, we’d been making an effort not to walk, let alone jump, on the the hatches in a successful bit to keep them watertight and not getting any worse. We then found a great …
