With no pretensions towards this being anything other than a "floating cottage" weekend, and with Jane having worked last night, we were in no hurry to set off for Fambridge this morning.
We got on the road about 11-ish and had a smooth journey down, stopping briefly at Chelmsford for supplies before arriving at the yacht station just after one in the afternoon.
Trying a new tactic, we'd packed our pillows into a large holdall which meant we had three bags, two sleeping bags and a bag of shopping plus ourselves to transfer on board. The idea, given that the ferry was running, was to avoid the time and hassle of coming alongside to load our kit on. The plan worked a treat and saved a lot of effort.
I hoisted the main on the buoy and, with the engine on tickover in case of trouble, sailed her off the bouy on the main and then hoisted the genoa. By half past one, we were under way downriver under sail. That lasted for about half an hour before I got bored with faffing about with trying to get the sails to draw in the light and fitful breeze and fired up the engine. Jane, meanwhile, had got her head down for a second dose of sleep therapy!
I wanted to experiment, in any case, with track mode on the tiller pilot. I'd carefully programmed a route downriver into Memory Map on the laptop and transferred it into the Garmin the previous day. Now, in theory, by pressing the relevant buttons on the pilot it should steer to the programmed track. Indeed it does although there are a couple of caveats. Firstly, it absolutely steers to the track (it uses the cross-track error as its vector) and if you get set well off track and then turn it on it will command a couple of hard turns to get back on track.
Secondly, it doesn't automatically make the turn to the next waypoint when you reach a waypoint. It will sit and beep (rather quietly) until you press the buttons. IF you fail to do this fairly smartly, you'll be well off track and .... see above!
However, it does work and whilst it isn't really suitable for automatically steering the boat up or down a river channel (and I didn't expect it to be, this was just a test excercise. Nor for that matter would I think it a very sensible thing to do) it should work better than steering a course on long legs in clear water.
All the faffing about with the tiller pilot led me to forget a vital task - emptying the dreaded portapotti. By now, I was in the thick of the Burnham moorings with several dinghy races taking place around me to boot. Not the place to dump the noisome contents of the bog overboard. Oh well, nothing else for it but to motor on by our destination and get downstream of everybody before doing the evil deed. This I managed to do but I would really like to sort out the loo installation (I have plans, more on that another day).
An about turn set us back upriver and I called Burnham Yacht Harbour on the handheld VHF to arrange a berth,. I'd tried calling them a couple of times coming down river but got no answer, this third call from just downstream of the harbour got an immediate response. I wonder whether the low height and low power of the hand held meant my signal was being blocked by the trees? Had it been important, of course, I'd have used the main VHF with its 25 watts of power and masthead antenna but it's hard to hear over the engine (hence the hand held in the first place).
As usual, we were over on A pontoon in the finger berths (fair enough 'cos we're only likkle!) and this time I managed to make a fairly reasonable job of getting in to the berth with a bit of welcome assistance from a passing berth holder. Jane was fast asleep throughout and I didn't want to disturb her if I could avoid it.
I went for a wander up into Burnham to buy some stuff and then wandered around the back of the yard to have a look at the outside of a Westerly Discuss 33 Centre Cockpit ketch up for sale for £22,995. I like the deck layout anyway but this example needs a lot of TLC. It's clearly been neglected for some time and its going green! If its in a similar condition below decks the asking price is probably optimistic. Anyway, we can't afford to buy it, can't afford to do it up and can't afford to run it so apart from filing the type away for future reference as a "one of those might do" there's nowt more to be said.
Found Lisa on Black Magic with Jim who'd helped her bring the boat around and had a coffee and a chat before heading back to Brigantia to wake the sleeping beauty and ready ourselves to go out. The main purpose of the excercise being a meal with friends off the East Coast Forum in the Swallowtail restaurant. The evening passed with good food, good conversation and good wine all flowing freely.
Back aboard, we were glad of the electrical hookup allowing us to leave the fan heater running on the thermostat overnight as otherwise it would have been bloomin' chilly on board!
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