Spring cruise - conclusions

It was a mixed bag of a week.

Had we been in the water from the beginning, we'd have lost the first weekend anyway as once again it blew up into a near gale almost as soon as we arrived at Fambridge. I am starting to get a reputation and people are asking about our plans so they can avoid the coast when we plan to be on the boat!

The Saturday shopping trip was reasonably sucessful and at last Jane has some adequate foul weather kit - not that we've really needed it so far as one thing we haven't had to put up with is rain when we've been out and about. The rain has generally arrived when we've been under cover!

It was annoying to discover, when we launched on Monday, that the depth sounder was u/s. The damn thing is only 15 months old. Doubly annoying to waste a trip to Felixstowe, £26 and three hours of my time to discover that the fault wasn't with the transducer but with the readout head. Yes, that's right ... the expensive bit. All sorted in the end but it generated a £250 hole in the boat budget which is money I'd rather have spent elsewhere.

Once we finally got under way on Tuesday afternoon, I was pleased to find that the new engine drives her along nicely. What was a little disappointing, to be honest, is how noisy it is. There's also a lot of vibration. Some work is needed around the engine well. Firstly, we need to cut away the lip on the top of the transom and make good so that the engine cover isn't in contact with it in the dead ahead position. That may cure most of the vibration problem, if not we'll need to look at isolating the mounting somehow. Then we need to look at the cover arrangement and sound insulation.

On the up side, the engine pushes her along at around 5 knots and coped well with some fairly rough conditions coming back up river on Wednesday. We've lost a little bit of ultimate top speed (the old engine would just about get her up to hull speed, 6 knots, at full throttle) but gained a huge improvement in economy. We used about 7 litres of petrol in 5.75 hours of mixed running which works out at near enough 1.2 litres per hour. In the same conditions, the old engine would have used between 2.5 and 3 litres an hour (up to 4 litres an hour at full throttle when the going got rough). We are certainly getting the hoped for improvement in fuel consumption which will go a long way to pay for the engine. Oh and it is also, so far, proving to be 100% reliable. It even started first pull for the first time when I fired up to motor back onto our buoy yesterday.

Talking of our buoy, the move even closer to the pontoon is nice and I'm happier now that our buoy is in the line of all the rest (last year, we were out of line and sitting right in the track up river towards the mooring pontoon). I'm slightly less happy by the extent to which boats on our trot are taking the mud at low water. OK, so the strong south westerly winds are swinging the boats towards the bank and they were big tides last week but even so, I'm paying for access at all states of the tide not for a half tide mooring. On the other hand, if I complain about it we could end up at the furthest end of the moorings from the dinghy dock and have half a bloody mile each way to row when the ferry isn't running! We shall see how that goes.

And talking of moorings, after looking at the fingerette berths in the marina we decided to stay on the swinging moorings. Theres a reason those fingerette berths are cheap ... they're going to be a blooming nuisance to get in and out of! OK, so we'd avoid the need for a tender (which we don't need on summer weekends anyway) and be guaranteed a berth alongside (but we've never actually failed to get alongside and only once have we had to raft up to do so) and the facilities are a little better but, and it's a big but, we'd have to motor up Stow Creek, then right around the full length of the marina and finally back her into an awkward finger berth with access being over the stern rather than the side. Not worth spending an extra £400 for we felt.

I have to admit to finding Tuesday and Wednesday a bit frustrating. Putting some hours on the engine was important as it needs to be run in before getting down to serious work. This meant changing the revs every few minutes and avoiding any long periods at full throttle. It also meant motoring when we could have been sailing. When I did finally get some sailing in, I was pleased to find that with the rig newly tensioned up and more adjustment available on the main now we have a proper clew outhaul the sails set well and she clawed her way up to windward even against a foul tide.

It has dawned on me though that just plonking around on the river for the sake of it doesn't hold much appeal to me. I need a destination, to be going somewhere. Even if it is just a potter down river to anchor for the night in the Roach, that is a "voyage" compared to just going out for an hours sail and coming back to where you started from. To that end, the decision to "voyage" from the Yokesfleet to Burnham Yacht Harbour was a good one and the night in Burnham was well worth the expense. It made for a change of scenery and we wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

And then, wouldn't you just know it, the weather turned once again. We high tailed it back up to Fambridge and nailed ourselves firmly on the inside of the pontoon in anticipation of thunderstorms and gales. The thunderstorms stayed away but the gales arrived with a vengenance. I was pleased I'd taken the trouble to rig the cockpit cover to keep the worst of the rain out of the cockpit and we were surprised at how much it cut the wind through the main hatch.

We had concluded that the outlay on a new echo sounder had buggered the budget for a tiller pilot. However, further discussions led us to revise that position. Jane enjoys getting away and being on the boat but she doesn't enjoy the "on deck" stuff so much. To be fair, hoisting anchors and heaving on ropes is savage amusement when your 5'4" and 7 stone. Effectively, I'm sailing single handed and that's absolutely fine provided the coffee, biccies and sarnies arrive at regular intervals (that's the quid pro quo of this deal!) but whilst Brigantia is light on the helm and will generally hold her course for a short while left to her own devices she won't do so for long.

We decided that we'd raid our reserves and buy the tiller pilot now and get it fitted whilst the weather precluded any sailing. Foxes had emailed me to say they had the Raymarine ST1000+ and cantilever bracket in stock now so off I went for the third run up to Ipswich stopping at the local tyre depot in South Woodham Ferrers to get the tyre wrecked by a nail (probably picked up in the boatyard) replaced. I was chuffed to find, after some searching on the shelf, that they'd got the power/data cable for our Garmin GPS72H. So I bought that and a four way waterproof plug and socket.

Despite spending most of Friday morning in our berths (it was too foul to even consider getting up) and jumping ship for a trip to Battlesbridge half way through the afternoon when we'd had enough of conditions on board, by the evening I'd got the tiller pilot mounted and fired up and the VHF receiving position info from the GPS. We've also now got a three way car socket available in the cabin for accessories and phone charging. The tiller pilot and accessory socket are wired to battery 2 ("once it's flat, that's that") with the essentials (VHF, GPS, nav lights) running off battery 1. Battery 2 is now wired up back to the selector switch so that it can be charged off the engine or mains charger or, in extremis, used to power the essential kit if battery 1 has died.

At present the tiller pilot is operating stand-alone. I have run a data (NMEA/Seatalk) cable back from the cockpit socket to the electrical cabinet but it isn't connected up to anything yet! There might be some merit in wiring it up to the GPS so that the tiller pilot maintains the intended track rather than a compass course but a possibly more useful arrangement would be to install a masthead wind instrument so that the tiller pilot could be operated in wind trim mode. That certainly won't be happening this year - I've spent quite enough money on toys as it is!

I'm pleased with the progress made on the boat systems and with the rig setup. The new blocks and lines on the running rigging are certainly making a huge difference - the main hoists much more readily and easily to the top of the track and the mainsheet runs out a treat without having to be coaxed along. There's still much to be done but we're making progress.

All in all, it was nice to get away for the week and we broadly speaking enjoyed ourselves. Given that we spent 8 nights on board, to be away from base for just 2 nights and sailing for just a handful of hours wasn't fantastic. We made the best of it but when, we might resonably ask, will we get a trip to the boat when there's nice sunny days and a force 3 breeze from the South West? All we seem to get at the moment is cloud, strong Easterlies (makes it rough on the river) and South Westerly gales. Surely it's got to get better soon?