Happy Easter Day otherwise known as what happened to Easter Sunday?
So we have “at sea” for about three weeks now and have to say for the first two it was bliss… sunny days (so hot we got nipped by the sun and had to splash out on sunscreen early!) and warm long evenings… most bizarre… and no we weren’t complaining but, as predicted by psychic Cate, as soon as we turned the corner to head up the east coast proper (just out of easy striking distance of the Med!) the weather took a decidedly chilly turn and now we are sitting in a muddy river in a rather unpleasant force 7ish with a wind chill factor of 500 requiring the heater to be used pretty much constantly… lucky for us these two things aren’t mutually exclusive as “Windy Miller” the wind generator can really chuck out the amps in this sort of stuff! (Can even watch telly if it gusts enough! – ahh the trapping of a modern boat life)
Anyway what have we been up to??? Lets see… a rough passage plan has been:
Chichester - you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone! Finally had completed all our jobs and been pulled out and put back in etc and it was time to leave. Have to say it was the prefect place for us to over winter… plenty of “good nature” to walk and cycle in, a couple of decent pubs within walking distance, a locked system so no tides and waves to worry about and the most amazing heated shower block ever (very important on those icy days… it something else to be able to take you boots off and pad about on a heated tile floor!) Can’t say we will miss it but it sure will be hard to beat next winter.
A few people have been to see us…
Thanks for not breaking anything Jez!
Graham – I think Citroën should pay for your medical care because your car stopping stone dead in the outside lane on the motorway because you’re polluting the atmosphere can’t have helped with the old ticker! Remember “winters coming!”
Karen and Alan – see you on the high seas!
Chichester to Brighton – come on guys dredge the entrance… lucky for us we only draw 1.5m or it could have been a long wait for a beer! Colds and sniffles all round so we enjoyed the luxury of the marina for a couple of days and basked in the high 20’s sunshine
Brighton to Eastbourne – same performance… (How much do these dredgers cost??) Great expression explained to us by a local – “Dover for the continent and Eastbourne for the incontinent!!” Enjoying some lovely sailing breezes and CC held off a Jeanneau 42DS with no effort – I don’t think they were best pleased and even less so when they chickened out of going into the lock and we snuck on in (it was a tight squeeze but the Skipper Muzza had it in hand!)
Eastbourne to Ramsgate – another lovely day and we making such good progress we bypassed Dover and went straight to Ramsgate. The people picnicking and fishing for those little three eyed monsters outside the nuclear power station at Dungeness enjoyed seeing us buck the gap (or was that bucking in the gap!) Ramsgate is an interesting place; grand esplanades and fabulous old dockyard buildings; it has a faded charm all of its own. Also gets the prize for being the first place I have seen a fender burst when we help some people move their narrowboat – those things must weigh a tonne! Still need to dredge these entrances – we sneak over the shallows yet again!
Ramsgate to the Medway (or Mudway as the locals refer to it!) Another great sail under a blue dome sky (is this global warming at its best or what??!) The sail up the Thames mud banks and sand spits is exciting and we have to pick our way at relatively high speeds thanks to the tide. It’s not exactly scenic when we get there but we pick up a visitors buoy and enjoy a wonderful warm sunset over the isle of grain enhanced by the pollution for the nearby industry. We are both reasonably frazzled by our sun exposure – in March – who would believe it??? While I am tidying up the boat I hear a yacht call up the coastguard to confess to “doing something really silly” and is now resting uncomfortably for the night on a mud bank in the Swale… the coastguard reassuringly tells him he better get pulled off next tide or he could be there for two weeks waiting for the next springs! Deep joy!
Medway – up to Chatham – and back…
We have a hankering to go to the historic dockyards in Chatham so we motor up river and pull into the Chatham Marina – what an impressive lock! Must have gone up a good 4 or 5 metres, water rushing everywhere and a very small (well it seemed that way!) space. The Historic Dockyards Museum was excellent – Murray excels in the Victorian Ropery (gold star for knowing all the answers!) and gets to make a piece of rope… too bad Russell Crowe was there making Les Mis or we could have seen the machinery cranked up… boo hiss… still we get to sample the local beer (Powder Monkey from the Nelson Brewery) to console ourselves. The “Ocelot” submarine is also great – don’t fancy the escape tubes but not as cramped as I thought it would be – ha ha!! Apparently the Russian nuclear subs are 11 times as big and could stay submerged for 24 years if needs be. Not sure the crew would enjoy that!!
The museum is so good (and you get an annual ticket!) that we go back in the morning as well. In the “Wall of Wood” exhibition we get to know that it took 3800 oak trees to make the Valiant… that 75 acres of oak per vessel – no wonder the landscape around is so denuded! Finally we head back out down the Medway – Murray is extremely chuffed as a woman came down especially to the lock to tell him how beautiful she though CC was!! Like we didn’t know that already! We end up down Stangate Creek for the night with all the nesting seabirds – another amazing day (we have been in shorts!) and the warm evening drags on and again the haze provides a wonderful sunset… this is what cruising is all about…
Medway to Burnham on Crouch
A misty day and little wind so we motor sail up to Burham (pass another guy who yells out “Wonder what the poor people are doing??” Some of us are sailing we reply rather pointedly! Its quite spooky sailing around the place in only a few metres knowing that the rest of it dries out but we manage to get the tides right etc and pull up in the Yacht Haven for the night. Burham is a really eclectic place and is excellent for mooching about the countryside in. We find a great pub (The Queens Head) and enjoy a couple of pints then a double episode of “Justified” (if you haven’t seen it, start now!) before retiring to bed. The next day is washing day (always a lottery using marina machines!!) and Jez is coming to visit – yay!! When Jez turns up we immediately walk him down to the pub and then enjoy a curry in the “Polash”. All very enjoyable – we are really mellowing out! Hey Jez just remember that the difference between perversion and eroticism is whether you use a feather or the whole chicken – What on earth happened in the forepeak??? Me thinks your sleeping bags imploded! Still amazing sun, sun, sun but the temperature is dropping…
Burham to Pinmill and Suffolk (NOT SUTTON!) Yacht Harbour
Another glorious day but the weather forecast is for gales and wind (thanks Jez I know you said it sometimes snows at easter but you don’t have to jinx us!!
Its champagne sailing today and we test out Murray’s £50 spinnaker pole and goose wing it for a couple of hours down the coast… then enjoy and fairly hair raising run up past Felixstowe in and out of the ships, buoys and shallows (good job we were fairly heeled over at times as not much depth outside the channel!) before picking up a buoy outside the pub (The Butt and Oyster) at Pinmill. Lovely countryside and Bramble has a great time chasing the Monkjack(?) deer and squirrels. The predicted bad weather comes to nothing… surprise, surprise!! Note to mariners… when moored up in Pinmill make sure your anchor light is on… some really big ships charge up and down the river at all times of the day and night… very scary!!
We are trying to catch up with another Cruising Association yacht to buy a Scottish pilot but after a series of comic texts I get the “dumass of the day” award for providing them with the wrong marina name and they sail on past!!
Suffolk Yacht Harbour to The Deben
Still waiting for the bad weather so decide to go anyway as we can’t afford the marina prices! Last night had an epiphany re “Nodding Syndrome” in the Sudan etc and wonder if they have got endophytes in the grain; sure looked like they were all suffering from Rye Grass Staggers… now who to tell!!? The entrance to the River Deben proves to be reasonably shallow 2.8m at high water and doing 8 knots with the tide is somewhat exhilarating… can’t beat coming into somewhere you don’t know at that speed! The entrance sweeps over to one bank then the other and then in and out of the channel markers and mooring buoys just to add to the interest. Once inside we can appreciate how pretty it is and pull up outside the Ramsholt Inn and pay our fiver to George for the lifeboat fund and enjoy a stroll around and a pint. There is a really nice church here – ancient and plain – a real smugglers haunt. The sun comes out again just to add to the tranquillity of the place. We are keen to get up to Woodbridge so we can go to Sutton Hoo (aahhh that’s where the mistake between Suffolk and Sutton Yacht Haven came in!!?) but we have to wait for the tide to provide us with enough water to get over the cill into the marina so we end up with a slow start. Good job we did. It is very shallow in parts and then we have to contend with a crosswind in a very small marina and an even smaller gap to park in… finally make it on the third attempt with no damage to us or anyone else! Not exactly a high five moment but every one you walk away from is a good one! Decided to avail ourselves of the washing machine and then get a bollocking for using the hosepipe. They have had to introduce a hosepipe ban already as half the usual rainfall hasn’t appeared… only 120mm so far. The fact that the fields around them are running with surface water seems to have escaped someone… Kathy and Bill finally catch up with us and we get our Skye pilot book. Thanks for the persistence guys… and happy sailing in the Netherlands and back to the US. Still can’t believe the weather and we spend the next day at Sutton Hoo (that’s pronounced “who” by the way) in the sunshine. Another amazing place and the displays and tour round the burial sites is really interesting. 5 hours of learning about Anglo-Saxon life (not Vikings!!) passed really quickly. FYI the Engs (English) or Angs (Anglos) as the romans liked to call them were originally a fertility cult from the Denmark region – think Beowulf – and the Saxons were from Germany. Really fascinating! Follow up all this exercise with more walking with Bramble and a trip to the Cherry Tree for a couple of scoops of Adnams Ghost Ship – lovely jubbly!
So we have “at sea” for about three weeks now and have to say for the first two it was bliss… sunny days (so hot we got nipped by the sun and had to splash out on sunscreen early!) and warm long evenings… most bizarre… and no we weren’t complaining but, as predicted by psychic Cate, as soon as we turned the corner to head up the east coast proper (just out of easy striking distance of the Med!) the weather took a decidedly chilly turn and now we are sitting in a muddy river in a rather unpleasant force 7ish with a wind chill factor of 500 requiring the heater to be used pretty much constantly… lucky for us these two things aren’t mutually exclusive as “Windy Miller” the wind generator can really chuck out the amps in this sort of stuff! (Can even watch telly if it gusts enough! – ahh the trapping of a modern boat life)
Anyway what have we been up to??? Lets see… a rough passage plan has been:
Chichester - you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone! Finally had completed all our jobs and been pulled out and put back in etc and it was time to leave. Have to say it was the prefect place for us to over winter… plenty of “good nature” to walk and cycle in, a couple of decent pubs within walking distance, a locked system so no tides and waves to worry about and the most amazing heated shower block ever (very important on those icy days… it something else to be able to take you boots off and pad about on a heated tile floor!) Can’t say we will miss it but it sure will be hard to beat next winter.
A few people have been to see us…
Thanks for not breaking anything Jez!
Graham – I think Citroën should pay for your medical care because your car stopping stone dead in the outside lane on the motorway because you’re polluting the atmosphere can’t have helped with the old ticker! Remember “winters coming!”
Chichester to Brighton – come on guys dredge the entrance… lucky for us we only draw 1.5m or it could have been a long wait for a beer! Colds and sniffles all round so we enjoyed the luxury of the marina for a couple of days and basked in the high 20’s sunshine
Brighton to Eastbourne – same performance… (How much do these dredgers cost??) Great expression explained to us by a local – “Dover for the continent and Eastbourne for the incontinent!!” Enjoying some lovely sailing breezes and CC held off a Jeanneau 42DS with no effort – I don’t think they were best pleased and even less so when they chickened out of going into the lock and we snuck on in (it was a tight squeeze but the Skipper Muzza had it in hand!)
Eastbourne to Ramsgate – another lovely day and we making such good progress we bypassed Dover and went straight to Ramsgate. The people picnicking and fishing for those little three eyed monsters outside the nuclear power station at Dungeness enjoyed seeing us buck the gap (or was that bucking in the gap!) Ramsgate is an interesting place; grand esplanades and fabulous old dockyard buildings; it has a faded charm all of its own. Also gets the prize for being the first place I have seen a fender burst when we help some people move their narrowboat – those things must weigh a tonne! Still need to dredge these entrances – we sneak over the shallows yet again!
Ramsgate to the Medway (or Mudway as the locals refer to it!) Another great sail under a blue dome sky (is this global warming at its best or what??!) The sail up the Thames mud banks and sand spits is exciting and we have to pick our way at relatively high speeds thanks to the tide. It’s not exactly scenic when we get there but we pick up a visitors buoy and enjoy a wonderful warm sunset over the isle of grain enhanced by the pollution for the nearby industry. We are both reasonably frazzled by our sun exposure – in March – who would believe it??? While I am tidying up the boat I hear a yacht call up the coastguard to confess to “doing something really silly” and is now resting uncomfortably for the night on a mud bank in the Swale… the coastguard reassuringly tells him he better get pulled off next tide or he could be there for two weeks waiting for the next springs! Deep joy!
Medway – up to Chatham – and back…
Medway to Burnham on Crouch
A misty day and little wind so we motor sail up to Burham (pass another guy who yells out “Wonder what the poor people are doing??” Some of us are sailing we reply rather pointedly! Its quite spooky sailing around the place in only a few metres knowing that the rest of it dries out but we manage to get the tides right etc and pull up in the Yacht Haven for the night. Burham is a really eclectic place and is excellent for mooching about the countryside in. We find a great pub (The Queens Head) and enjoy a couple of pints then a double episode of “Justified” (if you haven’t seen it, start now!) before retiring to bed. The next day is washing day (always a lottery using marina machines!!) and Jez is coming to visit – yay!! When Jez turns up we immediately walk him down to the pub and then enjoy a curry in the “Polash”. All very enjoyable – we are really mellowing out! Hey Jez just remember that the difference between perversion and eroticism is whether you use a feather or the whole chicken – What on earth happened in the forepeak??? Me thinks your sleeping bags imploded! Still amazing sun, sun, sun but the temperature is dropping…
Burham to Pinmill and Suffolk (NOT SUTTON!) Yacht Harbour
Another glorious day but the weather forecast is for gales and wind (thanks Jez I know you said it sometimes snows at easter but you don’t have to jinx us!!
Its champagne sailing today and we test out Murray’s £50 spinnaker pole and goose wing it for a couple of hours down the coast… then enjoy and fairly hair raising run up past Felixstowe in and out of the ships, buoys and shallows (good job we were fairly heeled over at times as not much depth outside the channel!) before picking up a buoy outside the pub (The Butt and Oyster) at Pinmill. Lovely countryside and Bramble has a great time chasing the Monkjack(?) deer and squirrels. The predicted bad weather comes to nothing… surprise, surprise!! Note to mariners… when moored up in Pinmill make sure your anchor light is on… some really big ships charge up and down the river at all times of the day and night… very scary!!
We are trying to catch up with another Cruising Association yacht to buy a Scottish pilot but after a series of comic texts I get the “dumass of the day” award for providing them with the wrong marina name and they sail on past!!
Suffolk Yacht Harbour to The Deben
Still waiting for the bad weather so decide to go anyway as we can’t afford the marina prices! Last night had an epiphany re “Nodding Syndrome” in the Sudan etc and wonder if they have got endophytes in the grain; sure looked like they were all suffering from Rye Grass Staggers… now who to tell!!? The entrance to the River Deben proves to be reasonably shallow 2.8m at high water and doing 8 knots with the tide is somewhat exhilarating… can’t beat coming into somewhere you don’t know at that speed! The entrance sweeps over to one bank then the other and then in and out of the channel markers and mooring buoys just to add to the interest. Once inside we can appreciate how pretty it is and pull up outside the Ramsholt Inn and pay our fiver to George for the lifeboat fund and enjoy a stroll around and a pint. There is a really nice church here – ancient and plain – a real smugglers haunt. The sun comes out again just to add to the tranquillity of the place. We are keen to get up to Woodbridge so we can go to Sutton Hoo (aahhh that’s where the mistake between Suffolk and Sutton Yacht Haven came in!!?) but we have to wait for the tide to provide us with enough water to get over the cill into the marina so we end up with a slow start. Good job we did. It is very shallow in parts and then we have to contend with a crosswind in a very small marina and an even smaller gap to park in… finally make it on the third attempt with no damage to us or anyone else! Not exactly a high five moment but every one you walk away from is a good one! Decided to avail ourselves of the washing machine and then get a bollocking for using the hosepipe. They have had to introduce a hosepipe ban already as half the usual rainfall hasn’t appeared… only 120mm so far. The fact that the fields around them are running with surface water seems to have escaped someone… Kathy and Bill finally catch up with us and we get our Skye pilot book. Thanks for the persistence guys… and happy sailing in the Netherlands and back to the US. Still can’t believe the weather and we spend the next day at Sutton Hoo (that’s pronounced “who” by the way) in the sunshine. Another amazing place and the displays and tour round the burial sites is really interesting. 5 hours of learning about Anglo-Saxon life (not Vikings!!) passed really quickly. FYI the Engs (English) or Angs (Anglos) as the romans liked to call them were originally a fertility cult from the Denmark region – think Beowulf – and the Saxons were from Germany. Really fascinating! Follow up all this exercise with more walking with Bramble and a trip to the Cherry Tree for a couple of scoops of Adnams Ghost Ship – lovely jubbly!
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