Although the wind finally dropped overnight, the day was still pretty breezy. With F6 plus forecast all weekend clearly we weren't going to get any more sailing in. Even on the river the conditions would be a bit too exiting for a crew of two.
Decision made to call it a day, we set to unloading gear and tidying up on board. In the process we got down into the bilges and the locker bottoms and sponged out the accumulated condensation and drip water that had built up over the winter.
I topped up the outboard tank from the Jerry can and estimated we'd used about 7 litres of fuel. I haven't added up the engine hours yet but I'm guessing we used something close to one litre an hour which is a huge improvement over the old engine.
With everything sorted on board, we motored down to our buoy using George the autopilot briefly for no other reason than to try him out. He worked! My first attempt to approach our buoy didn't however as a sudden strong gust at just the wrong moment blew us well off line.
Around we went for another go and this time I snagged the buoy tails from the cockpit. It's usually an easy task to then walk the buoy down to the bows and make fast. However, due to the strength of the wind I had to shout to Jane to put the outboard into astern to help out!
After I'd cleaned down the foredeck, lowered the burgee and taken in the ensign we called the ferryman for the short ride back to the shore. And so ended this trip :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment