July Long Weekend - Saturday

Dawn at Fambridge Yacht Station

It's a lovely start to the day and the skipper is, as usual, up bright and early ... well early anyway.

There's barely a breath of wind though and the tides are not ideal. We get away sharpish just before six to catch the last of the ebb downriver and anchor in the Brankfleet at quarter to eight to wait out the flood tide.

The outboard reverts to its tricks again coming in to anchor, cutting out as soon as its throttled back. The thought occurs to both of us that it seems to happen when the main tank is less than full so we top it up from the reserve jerry can.

I'm annoyed with myself as I've overlooked the fact that we didn't top off the tanks after our last trip so we now have a not quite brimming main tank and no reserve. Oh well, it's still enough for 9 or 10 hours motoring.

By gone Eleven I reckon the flood should have eased enough to make progress so it's on with the engine, up anchor and away back into the Crouch heading out to sea. An hour later, the engine is off and we're sailing making 2 knots over the ground in a half decent South Easterly breeze.

Although we're making progress, especially once the tide turns, it's slow going and as the breeze picks up and the ebb gets into it's stride the old wind over tide thing kicks in and the chop builds. We can't quite fetch our course close hauled on the Starboard tack and have to tack back across the channel once in a while losing precious ground every time. Jane is tired, I'm tired, it's not much fun and by 15:00 I've had enough and put about  to run back into the Crouch.

On a broad reach Brigantia simply flys along making, at times, nearly 4 knots over the ground despite the adverse tide. Working over to nearer the Foulness Sand I find the water is smoother than on the North side of the Whitaker. Everything else on the water is faster than us but not embarrassingly so since they're all also bigger and newer. We're not, I feel, looking like idiots who don't know what they're doing, even if we are!

By 19:00 we sail into the Brankfleet and anchor close in just upstream of the Branklet buoy under sail. Who needs an unreliable engine anyway!

After hoisting the ball and stowing the sails, we enjoy a delicious Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney pudding with tinned new potatoes and peas. Top nosh! Later once the tide has turned, I let out another 15m of anchor rode  - it's a high tide in the early hours and I don't want to drag the anchor and crash into the half a dozen yachts close upstream of us - and light the hurricane lamp and hoist it.

I wake briefly when the alarm goes off just before high water at 02:10, look out of the window and decide everything looks fine and go back to sleep. Might not be a proper anchor watch but what the hell, it's been a tiring time at work recently and I'm catching up on some much needed zzz's.

July Long Weekend - Friday

Neither of us have to be back at work until Tuesday night so Jane and I are off for a long weekend on board. Slept a bit later than I intended so we didn't get away from home until nearly 4:00pm which would put us on the Huntingdon - Cambridge A14 bottleneck at peak time for a 15 mile traffic jam. Hmmm! Decided to take the old pre-A14 route to the East and pick up the B645 at Rushden, the old A45 as was. It worked since despite two stops for coffee the journey took a tads over two and a half hours which is way better than previous Friday afternoon trips.

Dug the tender out of the tender dock, hells bells it's a nuisance maneuvering it between the other tenders stood on it's end to where there's enough space to lay it down, and I rowed down to bring Brigantia up to the pontoon while Jane waited to catch a line. Sort out the kit, a bite to eat and Jane retired whilst I went for a couple of pints at the Ferry Boat which went down well as did the chat with some of the other boat owners - I'm starting to get to know people which is great. One day I might even manage to remember some names!

Forecast is decent for the morrow although the tides could be better. Plan is to head downriver first thing and see what the day brings us - we'd like to get out and put some miles under the keels but we're not making any firm decisions in advance.

Maintenance weekend - Day 2

Sunday dawned bright and calm. Despite retiring so early the previous evening, it was getting on for 5:30 when I awoke - eight hours sleep is very unusual for me, like Jane I seem to sleep better on board than in my bed at home. The usual "breakfast" of coffee and cigarettes ensued and further reading of a not terribly good historical novel until by getting on for 08:00 I was getting bored and decided to make a start on some light and above all quiet tasks. I didn't think scrubbing the accumulated muck from around the stanchion bases would disturb the slumbering crews of the adjacent boats but it seems it didn't go unnoticed! It was a light hearted dig though, not a moan! On the other hand, the wake boarding boat that turned up with the ghetto blaster blaring loudly and shouty crew didn't go down so well and the crew of Janner (a sweet gaffer which is on my growing list of boats to drool over) intervened and got them to kill the noise - it apparently went down like a lead balloon but as it was still well shy of nine in the morning it was not an unreasonable request.

Heather, not my sons girlfriend but the lady on the boat next to me, came up with a brilliant idea of laying Brigantia against the pier next to the slipway in order to reach the top of the mast. Conrad, her other half, suggested we might be able to careen her over by enough although I had my doubts on that score but I did reckon that if I pushed my luck on the tide at the bottom of the slip the eye might just be within boathook range.

Thus was born Plan #D and I headed over to the pier to scry out the lie of the land only to find that Periwinkle, the pretty little gaff dayboat that lives on a buoy near the pontoon, had beaten me to it in order to re-attach his jib halyard which had parted from the masthead. No matter, I reckoned the tide, which had just turned, needed to ebb for another hour or two before I'd stand any chance of reaching my masthead. I helped David off Periwinkle sort out his problem and then toddled back to the pontoon to bring Brigantia over to the slip.

I knew that there was a 50/50 chance I'd not get off again but I was slightly surprised to run out of water before I was even fully alongside the pier. Close enough though to reach the ladder nd safe as houses as the concrete slip extends well beyond the end of the pier, the question now was would I be able to sort out the problem? David had stuck around planning to return the favour but as it seemed there was nothing to be done he headed off with the offer of a pint later when the pub opened.

Lashing both our boat hooks together got me within three feet - damn! Oh for those various nefarious bits of ally pole we'd turfed off the boat into the shed at home a few weeks previously! Conrad, Heathers other hald, came over to see if he could help and proposed using a section of ladder which was lying around on the pier. I think he was a bit disgruntled at my reluctance to act on the idea but I couldn't see how it could be tackled safely and I don't trust lengths of ladder left lying around especially if they have wooden rails!

A trip back down to the pontoon on a blagging mission added Janners boat hook to the lash-up and, with a bolt lashed onto the end to make a suitable hook I either exhibited supreme skill or, more likely, got lucky in hooking the eye splice with the wobbly contrivance in a matter of seconds. What a relief!

Borrowed boathook returned to it's rightful owner, I headed up to the pub for a very welcome pint with David and Ava in the hot sunshine. The breeze was most welcome for cooling but I now faced the prospect of sitting out quite possibly the best sailing day of the year so far high and dry. Never mind, plenty to do.

Resisting the temptation of a second pint, which would have almost certainly put paid to any further activity that afternoon, I clambered back down onto the boat with view to sorting out the genoa halyard. I need to reverse the halyard and lead it through the diverter block which, after a bit of head scratching, one coffee and two cigarettes I worked out, after nearly getting it fatally wrong, was a simple two stage operation.

Lowering the genoa onto the foredeck, I stitched the end of the genoa halyard to the line I'd rove around the diverter block (before I knew what it was) and hauled that line back around the halyard block ending up with the genoa halyard on deck and the spare line following the desired route. Swapping ends, now all I had to do was haul the halyard back around the blocks with the spare line and hey presto. Re-hoisting the genoa, I took a test pull with one hand on the furling line and the genoa disappeared as if by magic -no more two handed full blooded heaves required. Most excellent!

Rolling up my trousers and removing my socks, I sacrificed an old pair of shoes to plod around in the thin mud covering the slip and scrape off the worst of the weed. Seems the antifoul is keeping anything significant at bay and the weed came off easily enough. A couple of other people commented that it seems to be a bad year for weed growth and Brigantia is not the only yacht on the moorings to have developed a green beard!

Inevitably, coffee and a smoke break intervened before I tackled the next job on my agenda - refitting the fiddle block that acts as a turning block to bring the main halyard and topping lift back to the cockpit. We'd pulled the rather feeble padeye it was shackled to out of the handrail when we tried to hoist Mark up the mast, most fortunately when he was only a few inches off the deck. I'd put the padeye and screws in a safe place so inevitably they were nowhere to be found. Doubtless they'll turn up one day but meanwhile what to do? Luckily, I found two spare suitable padeyes in the port cockpit locker ... OK, so they were screwed to the boat but what they were for I can't imagine. Without further ado, I removed one of them and screwed it to the handrail using rather longer screws - it really ought to be bolted through the handrail, or better still the deck, but as I had no suitable bolts screws will do for now.

With the padeye in place, t'was the work of but a few moments to re-attach the fiddle block and reeve the lines back to the cockpit. I'm still not happy with the setup at the mast base - there are cleats all over the show but every single on of them is either the wrong size or in the wrong place! I was also annoyed to discover that I'd led the fall of the genoa halyard down the crowded port side of the mast instead of the starboard side which is occupied by nothing more than a flag halyard. That's easily sorted, drop the genoa onto the deck, pull the halyard through to the other side and re-hoist. As a strong Easterly sea breeze had kicked in by now I decided to leave this to another day as I didn't want the genoa flogging against the rusty steel and rough timbers of the pier.

Time was marching on and I hatched a cunning plan to persuade Ian to drop our tender onto the buoy in passing - he was constantly busy all afternoon with everybody wanting to be out on the water. Looking downriver it seemed there was a wall of white sailcloth, I shall have to bone up on Colregs if we get more weather like that! Down to the tender dock I went to launch the dinghy and then onto the pontoon to try and catch Ian in passing. It was at this point I spotted that our buoy was now occupied by another small yacht which had been on the pontoon all weekend. Now what? Ian duly arrived with his last load of passengers for the day and inquiries were initiated.

All thoughts of devious plans now firmly in the background, I hovered around whilst trying not to seem too pushy as, whilst we've no rights to any specific buoy, the one we've been on is the second best mooring for a small boat like us - it's downstream of the pontoon and close to the bank well away from the main channel. It's an easy row in fairly slack water with a back eddy on the ebb helping tremendously. In short, I don't want to end up at the far end of the moorings a long way upstream (the only place I could see any vacant buoys).

After cashing up the days takings, Ian got the binocs out and had a look around. He agreed to move the offending yacht onto a vacant buoy upstream on his way to run the dory back round to the marina where it lives at night. My offer of assistance was declined so I returned to Brigantia to start tidying up and offloading what needed to go home into the car. By 18:30 the water was lapping around the bottom of the hull and I reckoned there was enough water to reach the stern in the tender which I duly did with minimal embarrassment - I'm getting slightly better at rowing in a straight line although the dinghy does seem to do some strange things. It suddenly turns sharply for no apparent reason at times and take a dozen or more strokes of the relevant oar before it responds and comes back on track. I might be tempted to put a deeper keel on it over the winter to try and improve the tracking. Anyway, that done I started tidying up below decks reckoning I had about another hour at least to wait.

To my surprise, she was afloat by 19:15 when I'd reckoned it would be gone 20:00. The Easterly breeze had dropped and the tide wasn't running too strongly to I decided to go for a simple reverse out - a precarious business on Brigantia as experience has shown on several occasions. I like a challenge though so gave the outboard the beans and somewhat to my surprise and slightly impressing the spectators, she backed off the slip into deep water and came around as sweet as you could wish for.

Motoring down past the pontoon, I slipped across astern of Pauls Heard 28 (drool droll) and lined up for our now properly vacant buoy. Wind and tide were both in my teeth with the wind just slightly quartering so conditions were almost ideal for a single handed pick up. I'd planned to pick up from the cockpit and walk the tails forward but I set her up so neatly that I ended up all but parked with the bow about two foot away from the buoy and it was the work of moments to nip forward and grab a tail with the boathook.

Secure on the buoy, I killed the engine and even remembered to take it out of gear for once! All that remained was to tidy up the lines, put her to bed and row back to the pontoon. Oh and of our interloper, well Ian had saved himself the bother of towing her all the way back up the moorings and dropped her on the yellow buoy close inside of ours. Trouble is, that buoy is on the mud at low water springs! I suspect it won't be there next weekend.

With the flood running still, it was easier to row up the outside of the pontoon to land the dinghy as close to her hidey hole as possible as dragging the damn thing around one my own is not my idea of fun. I hauled her up on to the dock when David off Periwinkle happened by and gave my a hand to maneuver her into her space. I don't know what other tender docks are like, much the same I suspect, but one of my few niggles at Fambridge Yacht Station is that the tender dock is nowhere near big enough for the number of moorings and is cramped and crowded making moving your tender around on the dock a lot harder work than it could be.

Anyway, by now it was nearing 20:30 and time to hit the road. With a brief stop at the usual services for coffee, and a sandwich when I realised I hadn't eaten anything since having a brief snack late morning, it was a decent run back home in just over two hours.

It's nice to return home having actually reduced the number of items on the "to do" list for once! The only niggle is that in m haste to make haste when she floated earlier than expected I forgot to clear out the cool locker. The bacon will just go off in its packet, the bread will go mouldy and the margerine will melt but it's the remains of the bottle of milk that worries me. Hopefully it'll just fester in the bottle but if it leaks ... yuk! It's be a big worry if we weren't back on board on Friday

Add one item to the "to do" list - a departure checklist. Oh, it's already on the list, better do it then!

Oh yes, photos .. I took a few although not many but then left the camera on the boat. Doh!

Maintenance weekend - Day 1

Bit of a bonus weekend as both Jane and Carl have Saturday and Sunday off so after picking them up from the big shed that keeps Morereasons supplied with stuff at 5:30am it was hit the road to Fambridge on a dull and damp morning.

After a diversion to B&Q in Chelmsford to stock up on Meths for the stove, I arrived around 8:30 and caught a lift on the ferry down to the boat. Two things were immediately noticeable - one was the significant amount of weed growth around the waterline, the other was that she was distinctly down by the stern by a couple of inches. Hmmm!

Firing up the increasingly reliable Suzi - which hasn't played up at all the last couple of trips, maybe it was slow to wake up from it's winter hibernation, I motored the hundred yards or so up onto the pontoon where a kindly passer by caught my bow line for me.

First order of business was Cunning Plan #B for retrieving the topping lift. This involved hoisting a boathook on the main halyard with a control line tied to the bottom of it and trying to fish for the eyesplice. No matter how many times I tried, every time it got anywhere near the top of the mast it invariably twisted away and I couldn't control it with anywhere near sufficient accuracy to catch the offending string. To be honest, I'd half expected this would be the case but it had to be tried.

Ferryman Ian then offered the services of his daughter who'd be down on their yacht later in the day. I was a bit dubious about hoisting somebody else's child up my mast but reluctant to seem churlish and he was positive she'd consider it "fun" so that was agreed upon.

Other tasks were waiting to be tackled - first up was to reconnect the bilge pump and pump out the well under the cockpit which was half full of water. In the process, I discovered that there is a limber hole draining the port cockpit locker into the well but no sign of a matching drain on the starboard locker. As both lockers are accumulating water this needs to be sorted. We also need to replace the faulty float switch on the bilge pump - it's not a safety issue as the worst cases scenario is that the well will fill to cockpit floor level at which point it can go no further due to the cockpit drains. With the water evacuated she floated to her marks again.

My next mission was to fit the new cabin mushroom vents. One wouldn't open, the other wouldn't close and both of them leaked so two new ones had been laid in ready. The old ones came off easy enough and I fitted the new ones on a bed of sealant after drilling new pilot holes for the screws in between the existing holes - it's never a good idea to screw back into the existing holes if you want something to bed down properly!

Item no.3 was navigation lights. Although I have no intention of night boating at this stage of the learning curve, there's always the possibility of either getting caught out on timings or being forced by circumstances to be on the move in the dark. All three lights were suffering from bad connections due to bloody awful wiring than even an amateur would be ashamed of. Crimping spade connectors onto the wires instead of just wrapping them around the terminal sorted out the port light, replacing the incorrect sized spade connectors with the correct ones and replacing two badly crimped bullet connectors sorted out the starboard light. The stern light needed nothing more than the wires cutting back and fitting into the screw terminals properly. Hey presto, three working nav lights Just one job I forgot though - the steaming light was working but I swapped the connections over to try out the masthead anchor light, which didn't work, and I need to swap them back again. That's a five minute job next weekend.

Ian and his daughters arrived and with no fuss Charlotte was in the bosuns chair and Ian started to haul her up the mast on the main halyard - I was more than somewhat relieved that Ian took charge as I was not at all keen on being responsible for the safety of somebody's child up a mast. All went well until Charlotte was just above the spreaders at which point, no matter what we tried, the masthead block kept swiveling away from the line of pull and jamming. I would have called a halt to proceedings anyway but Ian beat me to it - he wisely felt, as I had done when trying to hoist Mark up the mast, that forcing the issue could break something and be seriously dangerous. Oh well, that was Plan #C down the drain. It seemed the fates were determined on us having to drop the mast mid-season.

By now, what with frequent halts to brew up and chatting to people on the dock and what have you it was late afternoon and I was tiring having not slept all that well the previous night (often the case on Friday night as it's a bugger making the transition from four nights at work to being awake during the day at weekends). I settled down below decks to read a book in peace - a rare commodity at home. Chille-con-carne, also a rare treat as Jane hates the stuff, and rice took care of dinner followed by more reading until by 20:30 my eyes were closing of their own accord and without even broaching the beer or rum stocks I crawled into my sleeping bag and nodded off.

Tempted ...

Jane's not working on Saturday night after all and the forecast for the weekend isn't too bad.

So I'm tempted to take a run down to the boat for the weekend and crack off some of the outstanding maintenance and repair jobs in advance of our long weekend in a fortnight.

Critical task is to try plan B for retrieving the topping lift - I reckon I might be able to snag the eyesplice with a boathook tied to the main halyard. If I can pull that off, I can then re-reeve the genoa halyard through the diverter block from the deck by pulling bits of string back and forth - it'll be a slightly complicated exercise but do-able.

Then there's the new deck vents to fit and all sorts of other minor and not so minor jobs to tackle!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've got a shed load of work to do preparing for the National Waterways Festival and zilch enthusiasm for tackling it today!

I wish I was going sailing ...

It'd be a lot more fun, even in the dicey weather forecast, that the weekend I've got ahead of me!

In my capacity as entertainment technical manager at the IWA National Waterways Festival I've just had land on my desktop a whole 8 pages of queries and additional compliance requirements to which I've got to respond within 7 days. It's ridiculous - it's not as if we're running a Who concert at Wembley Arena for crissakes!

Anybody fancy spending a weekend in a few weeks time standing at the corner of a field with a sound pressure level meter. We'll send a sandwich and a pint along from time to time! Oh, perhaps not the pint - after all, we can't possibly allow volunteer site workers to DRINK! Oh no, that would be dangerous.

If I hadn't already told 'em this was going to be my last year, this would be the final straw.

At least next year I'll have a whole two weeks more holiday to go sailing ... maybe we might get some decent weather!

June weekend - conclusions

Brigantia once again showed that when we get it right she can really fly along very well but she also showed that with a big overlapping genoa she'll get very unruly and behave like a stubborn mule if she's mistreated - several times we allowed the genoa to get backwinded through lack of concentration and were left with no option other than to tack - all very well if there's room but if we did it at the wrong time ....

The shroud covers have helped the genoa sheet hang ups and the dodge of attaching a length of line across the sheets to form a loop ahead of the sheet knots seems to be working quite well too. We'll know better whether it's really worked when we get into the light conditions where hangups were occurring every tack.

I'm increasingly convinced that we need to do some rig tuning though!

Saturday was a very fustrating day. The breeze was constantly shifting, dropping, picking up again and we could never get into any sort of sailing rythym. Sunday morning was a wee bit too exciting for the girls but good fun, if a bit hairy at times, for the chaps! With hindsight, I wouldn't push on around the corner into the Brandy Hole in those conditions under sail again - there's not much room to muck around up there!

I haven't mentioned in the daily logs the abortive attempt to resolve the problems up the mast. We still need to retrieve the topping lift and we've now realised that the genoa halyard is rove incorrectly at the masthead (which is why, we think, the furling gear is so stiff). I have a cunning plan .. watch this space!

Oh and finally, photos ... I didn't take many and due to the conditions the ones I took were crap! So there aren't any :)