So we have had a hard week after returning from a stunning holiday.  The previous weekend we returned from Antigua which you could have called a beach holiday or us doing a recce of suitable anchorages. Maria always seems to have ants in her pants and this was no exception with the holiday being punctuated by two trips around the island on a sailing catamaran, two days driving around the island, two visits to Shirley heights with dancing all night, two trips to an adjacent hotel, a tour of English Harbour, kayaking and sailing a hobbie cat! Very restful, not!

This holiday had arrived at a good time after the tragic news of Maria’s youngest sister passing unexpectedly. The funeral was scheduled for when we returned which of course meant it was going to be very hard emotionally. On Thursday, Natalie was laid to rest in a very fitting ceremony. On our return to the boat on Friday, I felt that Maria needed to get away from it all and so told her to pick up some bait from the fishing tackle shop – yes, that’s right, time to feed the crabs again!

This weekend was also the Thames Barge Match and last year we found a fantastic spot to watch the races of these glorious old sailing ships. We were lucky to get some fantastic pictures of these last year so let’s do that again. The wind forecast was for a very light northerly wind.

As we cast off our lines on Friday afternoon, the wind seemed quite a bit more than the forecast 10 knots but that shouldn’t be a problem. I am still working as we head down river and I have to disappear to the fore peak to do an important call for work. When I emerge we are at the moorings opposite Suffolk Yacht Harbour at Levington. Maria has flicked Mariadz round to go into the wind which is gusting in excess of 20 knots. I am ready with the boat hook in hand and a line ready to thread through the buoy. We communicate quite well and Maria gets the boat perfectly positioned for the pickup. I have grabbed the pick up line and haul it up to the deck to thread our line through. So far so good. Our line is through and it is then that I notice that our line is in between the guard rail lines, that help to keep us all in the boat. How did that happen? I have a technique where the lines are run around the outside of the boat to avoid this so clearly I have messed up badly here. So I have to keep hold of the buoy with the boat hook, while I unthread our line, pull it out of the guard rail line and rethread it. All while Maria holds Mariadz on station against a strong current and now 24 knots of wind. We are now broadside on to the wind which rather limits Maria’s options and we are struggling. I decide it would be best just to start again. The line is dropped but the boat hook is snagged on the buoy and won’t release. I am being pulled by twenty tonne of sailing yacht away from the buoy and I am desperately trying to hold on to the boat hook. Maria is able to moneouvre us a little closer and I can extricate the boat hook. Let’s try that again….. the approach for the second attempt isn’t quite as smooth as the first, the wind seems to be stronger and gusting, definitely not what is on the prediction. We get close and I have grabbed the buoy again. I know the line is right this time but I can’t get it through the buoy, I am still holding on as the gusts get the better of Maria’s boat control and we are getting dragged further away from the buoy. It’s ok, I have got it….. my shoulders, back and forearms are protesting as I try to manhandle the buoy close enough to get the line through. And then I can take no more, I let go and get to watch our third metal extendable boat hook disappear into the River Orwell. I strongly suspect we are making a little pile of these down there! Maybe a metal version of Jenga. I am sorely tempted to dive down one day before we leave and retrieve the stockpile.

Anyway, we are not having that! The backup boat hook is called into action! This time we will get it right. There is, of course, an argument that when you are being given a hammering by the elements and Lady Luck, it is probably best to cut your losses. That’s not how we roll on Mariadz, although maybe in future it will be. The interesting thing about the backup boat hook is that unlike the primary one, it floats….you are probably wondering how I know that. Interestingly, I only discovered this today on our third attempt at the same buoy. At least it seemed that the boat hook floated as it remained attached to the buoy after I had been forced to let it go (again). Retrieval was going to be an interesting lesson in boat handling as Maria approached the buoy from astern with me on the swimming platform.  After a couple of attempts, we had mastered the approach and I was able to retrieve the boat hook. I guess this really didn’t prove that it floated since it was still attached to the buoy. The floating theory was proved on our next attempt when the boat hook was let go again, and disconnected from the buoy and floated off down the Orwell with us going astern chasing it down! Maria was getting adept at going astern to pick up boat hooks so we don’t go too far to get it back. Ironically, we caught up with it adjacent to another buoy which we were alongside for ages, but on the wrong side!

The reason we were struggling was the design off the hook itself which worked well at picking up the buoy but rather less well at letting it go again after I had threaded our line through it. I couldn’t get it off even though I had the line through. One last attempt or we are going to anchor somewhere! We are nothing if we are not stubborn! Once again, Maria gets the approach spot on and this time it is textbook. Buoy is pulled up, line threaded through and boat hook disconnected before walking to the bow of the boat to tie off the end on another cleat! Of course this would have happened the first time, and I would have saved a boat hook, if I hadn’t had the line twisted through the guard rail wires! We can now lick our wounds, despair at our losses and get a well earned beer – we must have burned enough calories to justify that!

As we gently swing around the mooring, we start to set ourselves up for some relaxation with the table and chairs out and Maria starting to get her fishing gear ready. 

I may have mentioned that Maria had visited the fishing tackle shop, where she had been able to entertain them with her stories of catching fish including the infamous “three skate” at Osea Island. They are suitably impressed by her prowess but do point out that if she catches sea bass this weekend she has to throw them back. That’s typical. Nothing is going to stop her having her fun though.  At least the wind seems to be dying and the sun is out so the perfect opportunity to top up our Antiguan tans!

Maria has the fishing rods out of their bag but, unfortunately, one of the reels doesn’t seem to be working correctly and there is a metallic rattle coming from within it.  Maria has decided that it is time to take the reel apart and sort it out so that she can continue fishing. Now those that know me well, will know that I was a bit of a whizz with clocks in my youth.  You could bring me a broken clock and I would take the whole thing apart meticulously, find the problem and put it back together again. As an added bonus you would even get a few spare parts in  addition to your still broken clock. It was therefore with some apprehension that I serviced the winches last year but that seemed to go ok and they all still seem to work 🙂 How hard can it be….

Fishing reels are probably more like a clock than a winch….. certainly having looked at the diagram. We start to take it apart and I lay the pieces out in order on the deck to remind us what order to put them back in. As we get to the body of the reel, we have undone the screws and as the body cracks open a spring pops out…. Any idea where that came from darling…..Nope! Oh dear, this has got clock written all over it! We continue to try and understand the problem and it appears that a couple of screws have come off. Problem understood it is now time to put everything back together again. But we still have no idea where the strange shaped object and the spring go. The diagram isn’t really helping either. After some time the obvious solution comes to me and I can see how the shaft fits through the body and therefore where it needs to go. Mystery solved, I set about putting everything back together. To be fair this has probably taken over an hour by now, there will be no more fishing tonight! Having established how everything should go back together, actually putting it back together correctly keeping all the parts in place seems to be a different matter all together. Eventually I succeed in getting the body closed and it seems to be right. Either way, I am not taking it apart again and all of the parts seem to be back in place.  Ten minutes later it is the moment of truth….and the mechanism is working. Let’s see how well it does tomorrow.

Dinner is a quiet affair in the cockpit with the sounds of the water and various bird life twittering away. It’s a reasonably early night and we know, after the week we have had, it will be a good night’s sleep.

The next morning there is the light northerly breeze that we were expecting and it is bright with some sunshine. Excellent conditions for the Thames Barges and I suspect that we will see a lot of sail up today. Maria starts fishing and miraculously the reel seems to be working better today. Maybe all those years with clocks wasn’t a complete waste of time! She is still not catching anything though with most of her bait being eaten by snails or crabs. We also discover that our friends Amanda and Mark were at Levington the previous evening and witnessed the entertainment, particularly us chasing our second boat hook back up the river, backwards. So there will be no bending of the truth in this blog….

It’s closing on 10am when the racing is due to start but not before we get the opportunity to experience an amazingly thoughtless motorboater. I saw him coming up the river for a little while on the plane with a huge wash behind him.

He decides to cut the corner of the river and fly through the moorings causing havoc behind him. Unfortunately the boat had no markings and you know they would not have been listening to the radio.  Just a shame they were so inconsiderate of everyone else.

We hear the first horn at pin mill for the start of the first race of the fastest barges.  These are large with a lot of sail and it is all flying today. Another commercial barge, hydrogen, is following them down the river offering great views of the race. They are also well positioned so that they don’t get in the way of the photos tho :).

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The second race is a very close affair at the start with another viewing barge Thistle right in amongst it. Unfortunately this meant that there was little chance of getting really good pictures until they were past us.  To be honest I was just happy that Thistle missed us as they pass close enough that we can talk to their guests without raising our voices.

After the last race has gone past us, we decide to go. We could have waited for the return of the barges as the race finishes in the late afternoon, but decide that we would rather head to tonight’s anchorage in the Stour rather than waiting til late in the day. The weather and the barges have certainly brought out a lot of boats though as I happily snap away at anything with a sail up!

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Like yesterday, the wind is very gusty and varying from 1 knot to 18 knots. It’s a bit tricky to set a sail for that! We are also against the tide and having spent an age around Harwich tacking and making little progress, we decide to motorsail down the river so that we can arrive a few miles up the river before dark.

Once anchored, which goes without a hitch, Maria is back to fishing for crabs and snails…. sorry I mean fishing, but catching crabs and snails! An afternoon of chilling is disturbed by the arrival of our friends Stig and Widya from Wild Dream II on their rib. They are playing about on the water and come on board for a quick chat and a small drink. We sit out on the aft deck chilling, chatting, drinking a glass or two and eating nibbles. What a lovely relaxing time.

You’ll notice that the cats haven’t featured prominently so far, this is because they have been asleep all the time.  They must have been running around while we weren’t here because they seem shattered now. Eventually Clyde stirs but it will take a lot to get Bonnie to wake up before early evening. Of course she will then be a terror during the evening as she prowls the decks.

It’s getting to evening time and we need to start thinking about dinner. Firstly Maria gives the cats their treats, licky licks for Bonnie and a couple of prawns for the boy, he really is a prawn monster – can’t get enough of them. That wakes them up. Just in time to hassle us as we have our grilled meats and salad for dinner. We stay up in the cockpit until late and at this time of year it is 10pm before we see the spectacular sunset over the Royal Hospital School.

One advantage of the long sunny days is that the solar power works amazingly well. On this day we pull in more than 5KWh of power and the batteries are fully topped up despite using the kettle, microwave, ice maker and water heater from time to time during the day.

Sunday morning is another glorious day and a day for watching England in the World Cup finals as they play Panama at lunchtime. We decide to leave at about 10am to be back in good time. The boat is prepped quickly and having remembered to switch off the anchor alarm, I go forward to raise the anchor.  Normally we are half a mile down river when we recognise the alarm going off saying we are dragging our anchor so it is good that we have been able to remember it this once. The first step is to remove the deck snubbers that protect the windlass from any snatching of the chain. The chain is then lifted a few metres to ease the tension on the main anchor snubber which normally takes the strain just below the waterline. This acts as a shock absorber, eases the load across our two bow cleats and protects our top sides from a rubbing chain. So far all good. The remainder of the chain is lifted and the anchor breaks the surface. Maria gets the signal that she has control but no bow thruster since the anchor buoy is still in the water. Normally I stow the anchor before removing the buoy line that is tied to the roll bar, which also acts as a trip for the anchor if necessary. I try to stow the anchor which is coming up backwards for some reason.  It will normally flip as it comes through the bow roller so I am not concerned. Not this time though. The anchor steadfastly refuses to twist to its correct position despite my constant attempts to lower and raise it. I can’t understand what is going on, but one last try and the anchor starts to turn but then jams across the bow roller. It’s stuck fast and no amount of pushing or leaning over the bow and pulling is budging it. While I think this through I decide to retrieve the buoy and suddenly the culprit is uncovered. The buoy and the line are covered in six feet of thick seaweed. That doesn’t sound so bad but I can not lift it! This pull against the top of the anchor must have stopped it turning. There must be in excess of thirty kilos of seaweed attached. I tie the line off with the buoy next to the bow and retrieve my trusty boat hook to start peeling the layers of seaweed off, it is a difficult job at full stretch but eventually enough comes off for me to lift the buoy and clear the rest by hand. I can now detach the buoy from the partially but solidly stowed anchor. We’ll be bow to the pontoon in our home berth so I will sort this out later. It must have looked quite strange as we returned up the Orwell to Ipswich.

There really isn’t enough wind for Mariadz especially running with the wind so there will no sailing today 😦 The weather is glorious though and a lot better than the two predictions I had shared with Maria so we are quite happy as we motor back at a steady 5-6 knots. We arrive back at Ipswich lock and it has gone 12:30, less than 30 mins to kick off. This is going to be tight. As Maria moneuvers Mariadz into her berth, Fraser, who runs the committee boat for the barge race comes to help us tie up. He does a great job and also resists the urge to point out the jaunty angle that our anchor has taken. What a lovely man. We set up the tv to watch the game from the aft deck and the teams are coming out. We have made it just in time.

The game is a great success for England who lead 5-0 at half time. Now to sort out that anchor. With five minutes of effort I am able to manhandle the anchor and unjam it. It settles down perfectly for stowing since it no longer has a load of weight dragging it the wrong way. At least that isn’t a big problem! For the second half we are joined by Amanda and Mark who regale us with tales of watching two numptees make a hash of picking up a buoy on Friday night…. oh well that is undeniable then. I point out the near gale force winds, the full speed of the tide and Maria’s valiant attempts to balance Mariadz on a sixpence but they don’t stop giggling at us. The England game comes to a satisfactory conclusion at 6-1 and the drinks are flowing.

For some time, Maria has been nagging for a paddle board. I have resisted the urge to spend a lot of money on this until she has absolutely demonstrated that she can use one.  We were due to have a trial in Antigua but this fell through. Considering everything else that we did, this probably wasn’t a bad thing. Discussing this with Amanda and Mark provided an interesting insight, Amanda loves it but Mark didn’t get on with the paddle board at all. To the extent, that he would gladly sell his board. So Maria gets to try a board and I have been stitched up again.

Maria does have to test drive the board though after a few drinks…. this should be funny! Firstly, Amanda shows how it is done and gracefully paddles around the Marina. Next up, Maria. Getting on the board from the bathing platform is pretty good but the next stage is key. Like surfing, you have to get up onto your feet and balanced, except surfing wasn’t too easy when we tried it eighteen months ago in Australia! Like a sprinter, Maria wiggles her bottom before getting to her feet, and she’s up! On the first attempt. Step two is to paddle and Maria is settling into this before deciding it is time to stand up. The last words before she face-planted into the water were – “I think I am getting the hang of this”. No amount of words can paint the comedic picture effectively. So here are a couple of videos:

So the end of a fantastic weekend with lovely sailing boats, relaxing times, no fish being caught and then the entertainment. It was good to get away from everything.

For the August bank holiday last year, we visited Osea Island, location of the retreat that Amy Winehouse visited for rehab. This has since closed down but the island is very nice and in good weather feels like it could be in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. So with a sunny bank holiday expected, we decided it was time to return to the anchorage adjacent to the island where we had a fantastic time.

The plan was to leave very early on Friday morning with a view to arriving at the island early in the morning so that we could both do a full days work. One advantage  of living on board is that when working from home, your home can be anywhere 🙂

To try and reduce the travel time on Friday, we decided to get away on Thursday evening with a view to picking up a mooring ball at Levington and saving over an hour on our journey time. Unfortunately by the time we get home and get the boat ready, it’s already nearly 7pm when we leave Ipswich to head down river. It is incredibly quiet on the river with the tide pushing us down the river and it feels like the holiday has started even though we have a full work day on Friday. Both cats are relaxed and Maria is keeping an eye out as we motor downriver.

We get down to Suffolk Yacht Harbour at Levington and find all six of the mooring buoys opposite the marina are free.  We pick up a buoy at the first attempt, admittedly having spun round it a little to start with as we initially approached it with the tide but Maria is able to turn Mariadz around on a six pence using the tide and I can grab the buoy. It is going to be an early night since we plan to be up at 5am the next morning, exactly as if we were travelling to London for work. Even going against the tide, we expect to arrive at Osea Island shortly after 10am.

So we get to watch the sunset, eat sensibly and catch up on a few TV programmes, and settle down for a good nights sleep. In fact that was the last time the TV was switched on all weekend which has to be a good barometer of a good time! Sunrise the next day over Levington is glorious as we get up at 5:15 and we are feeling good and happy. Those that know Maria in the morning will know that this is unusual!

A night at anchor gives us a view of our power consumption overnight and monitoring is showing the batteries at 82% of usable capacity (which is 50% of rated capacity) so less than 10% of their total capacity has been used.  We would expect that to be replenished by the solar but with the wind we have we will be motoring for hours anyway so the batteries will be fully charged when we stop. This weekend should be a good test of whether our solar capacity can keep up with our usage.

There is very little wind as we exit Felixstowe and head through the Medusa channel towards the wallet but what little there is will be on the nose the whole away, and against the tide! This is the price you pay when you are guided by your watch rather than the tides but we need to be settled down and anchored to do a full day’s work and the weather will not be dangerous. Normally of course, we would optimise our passages for the tides so instead of being held back by two knots, you gain two knots. At our average cruising speed this makes a huge difference from 9.5 knots down to 5.5 knots. Imagine how quickly we’d have made it if the tides were favourable! It’s going to be over thirty miles of motoring so not much fun.

Even at this time of the morning, Felixstowe is very busy and as usual the Lobster pots in the medusa channel need to be avoided. I have mixed emotions about these since they are a hazard best avoided but if they weren’t there where would the Alma in Harwich get it’s delicious lobster from? The lobster pots are one of the reasons we normally wait til daylight for this part of the trip, they are everywhere and you need to keep a sharp lookout to avoid one getting wrapped around the keel or prop.  Although we have a rope cutter around the prop which should cut the line holding the pot, that isn’t ideal and I wouldn’t want to bank on it working.

By 6:30am, we have made the top of the wallet and are against wind and tide but the lack of wind means it is flat and a grey/brown colour. So the only thing to do is take photos of all the other people mad enough to venture out on a Friday morning. There aren’t many!

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So we are travelling slowly, by our standards, down the wallet flanked by the coast on one side and the wind farm which seems to go on forever at this pace. When we go to Burnham, we have to cross the spitway but for Osea, we need to continue past Bradwell and into the Blackwater. Both of these routes require a little care because of the shallows, especially on a falling tide like today. So we tiptoe through the shallows to avoid having to take a bigger detour and subsequent delay. Looking at the track on our chart plotter, it looks like we have zigzagged in some kind of submarine avoidance manoeuvre. But as we emerge into the Blackwater, the clouds are breaking up and the sun is trying to break through. Now Maria can be a bit of a bad influence in these situations, asking whether we should just take the day off and have fun! She is a very naughty girl and I point out if work phone or email will she answer, of course the answer is yes, and so we won’t be taking the day off then!

The weather is improving by the minute and in the Blackwater we have blue sky, sun and glassy water. There is still very little out on the water but with the prediction for the weather that will change over the weekend and I’m sure we will see a lot of the boats moored in Mersey coming down the river. This time I have tried to avoid the cliched Radio Caroline picture! It’s just after 10am as we arrive in the anchorage and there is not a soul around. The weather is glorious and Maria selects her usual spot to anchor.  This will be the first test of the new remote for the windlass….. of course it works, was there really any reason to doubt it. Within minutes the anchor is set, snubbers and anchor buoy deployed with the anchor ball flying. We can settle down to get on with our work until mid afternoon when we can switch off, well we did start answering emails at 5:30am!

Maria decides that flushed from her recent success, she is going to set up the fishing rods. Unfortunately due to our late departure on Thursday, we missed the tackle shop and so she is baiting with squid only rather than combining with the rag worm she has used previously. I strongly suspect that she is getting her excuses in early! We settle down knowing full well she is not going to catch anything. This is shame since Maria is hoping to prepare a paella for dinner, we’ll have to wait and see.

There are a couple of false alarms from weed getting caught on the line but then Boom, the rod goes wild. Maria runs up to see what she has… the strain on the rod is immense and Maria is struggling as I retrieve the net from the bow and fill a bucket with water – see I didn’t have much confidence that we would see fish this time. As her catch nears the surface it is huge and looks to be a skate, or thorn backed ray. What do you do with those…clearly we have no idea. We don’t even know how to kill it never mind prepare it. I fall back to an approach we were given to kill fish – gin in the gills. But it seems the skate is quite liking this. We search the internet but are no closer to a decision on how to kill it. All of this combined with Maria’s opinion that it looked “too cute” means we retrieve the hooks and release it back into the water. It swims off but not in a straight line since it is probably drunk. I’m sure it will be back later with some mates asking for more gin and squid. That Mariadz, they know how to throw a fish party!

However it is only a handful of minutes later that  Maria strikes again catching another, smaller ray, this time we decide quickly to return it.  If only we had caught a couple of bass…. although I do spend some time complaining that I quite fancied trying skate!

So it is Paela for dinner, but not caught by Maria. Although quite how she would have sourced the pork and chicken on the water, I have no idea… maybe a swimming cow giving a pig a ride that got caught on her line.

After dinner, we are sitting in the cockpit watching the sun go down over the island, where some other yachts have anchored and it is bliss. Unlike last night, we are out there beyond 9pm, dirty stop-outs!

The cats are very comfortable on the boat, wherever we are.  They spend most of the day chilling either down below or in the cockpit which is now incredibly comfortable for them with new cushions and cat mats. However, at night, Bonnie in particular, comes alive and wants to go exploring her surroundings. She will walk the deck and sit on the bow peering out for hours before coming in for the night to chill. At some stage we will have to put up nets on the guide wires around the deck to give us additional security and hopefully stop them falling in.  At the moment we rig fenders with covers on each side of the boat so that they can claw themselves back on if necessary.

Another glorious morning with blue skies and not a cloud to be seen and we are awake quite early. This time the culprit is Clyde demanding attention, jumping on the bed, our bodies and our heads. He really wants a fuss. So did I, but my demands for attention fall on deaf ears. Proof that cats are worse than kids!

It may be early but it is certainly not a lazy morning. One of the problems with this part of the river is also one of its charms. The river is used by all types of watercraft and there seems to be little adherence to the speed limit of 8 knots by the speed boats and jet skis. Now that’s something I don’t get. I watch the jet skis going up and down, mostly in straight lines at great speed, at least thevisnt much of a wake to disturb us so it is just the engine noise. They then turn around and do the same again. I used to enjoy driving sports cars but the thrill was the handling and acceleration rather than the outright speed in a straight line. I am now reminiscing about two seater soft tops and I won’t be allowed another one of those! Still each to their own and the jet skiers seem to be enjoying themselves even if they are spoiling our tranquility. To my mind though it’s a waste of fuel! Water skiing, on the other hand, I can get especially if the person is very good, today though we mostly have people going up and down firmly hanging on rather than the acrobatics we have seen before.

We are pottering around the boat playing music and the day is heating up as the weekend builds to the hottest May bank holiday in years.

The solar array is doing wonders. When we woke up in the morning the batteries had provided all of our power for the night, a boiled kettle for breakfast, hot water from the tank and Maria’s very powerful hair dryer for ages as she dried her very long hair. All of this and we have used 120Ah of battery which at 24V is about 2.5KWh. Over the admittedly sunny weekend, we averaged 4-5KWh per day for our 720W of solar. With our daily use this means that the batteries are pretty much staying topped up purely on solar and definitely would be if we showed a little more restraint in our power usage.

Since we will be anchored for a while I decide to break out our hammock and rig it between the mast and the staysail. Using the chords that came with it, I tie it to a secure spot on the mast and to the clearing on the stay sail. This makes it nice and high and I don’t think should be causing any damage. I am also able to persuade Maria that with our new svelt bodies , the rig should be able to take our combined weight, dubiously she gives it a go! It’s a lovely relaxing day and I break it up by taking pictures of the passing watercraft like some kind of demented yacht equivalent of a train spotter. Still it keeps me occupied 🙂 .

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While I have been pottering, Maria has been in touch with her cousin who is going to come and visit us for 24 hours. They will be driving to Maldon where they can leave the car and I can pick them up in the rib before bringing them the four miles back up river. We’re quite a bit off high tide when we decide to leave and we notice it is quite muddy around the river. Arrival at Maldon is an interesting affair as we can see that the landing pontoon is high and dry with some water around the end. We can just about approach the pontoon but it is three foot to the pontoon. We’re both able to scramble off the rib which I’m sure we would have struggled with pre-diet. There are a few bars in this part of Maldon and we decide to sit in the Queens Head, right on the waterfront, well mud-front to be precise, while we wait for Denise and Kirk to arrive.

They arrive and we find them somewhere to park, not easy in this part of Maldon! A quick drink before donning life jackets for the trip back. Connie the rib (named after Clyde and Bonnie incidentally) is quite lightweight with a 20hp Suzuki injection outboard. However, we are now four up in her with an overnight bag and some essential supplies that they have brought – looks like alcohol and snacks to me! Even flat out we are only making six knots so it is going to be a leisurely trip back to Mariadz. At least we can see all the sights!  As we return to the anchorage to Mariadz in all her glory, the area Ian noticeably busier than it was when we left.

Maria has also been speaking to some sailing friends Russ and Sarah, who are getting their boat out of Maldon when there is enough tide and coming to the anchorage. This was the couple we met last August when we were last at Osea and we had a great time. When they arrive a little later in the afternoon, they come on board for a few drinks and of course they are no empty handed… oh dear this could get messy…. again!

Russ is apparently a very accomplished fisherman and so Maria takes advantage to get a fishing lesson despite her success with skate the day before. After several hours the catch is a little underwhelming – skate, 0 sea bass, 0 whiting, 0 mackerel. But i am sure Maria has learnt some useful techniques.

Evening falls on a great day as we are happily chatting, enjoying a healthy barbecue and salads while we listen to music.

It is low tide and very dark when Russ and Sarah decide it is time to go back to their boat. Of course at low tide, Mariadz will turn around and face the incoming tide, having been facing the outgoing tide when they arrived. Since it is low water, Mariadz is actually pointing towards the shore, and their boat, one hundred maters away. However, Russ is on autopilot as he starts the outboard, having just fallen into the rib and banged his head! They gather up their stuff and head off on the same vector, with respect to Mariadz, as he had arrived…..which of course is now heading down river towards Bradwell!  This is despite me shining a torch at their boat lighting up the hull, and then waving the light at them. We have our very bright spreader lights on so when they realise they are lost, they will at least know their start point. They keep going for about ten minutes before I can hear the engine note change and they turn around to come back to us. They must have gone at least half a mile before realising their error but we didn’t make any comments about their navigation, well maybe a couple…

They are safely back on the boat and the four remaining revellers chat a little more before deciding it is time for bed. We even tidy up before we go so that everything is tidy for when we get up.  This is sharp contrast to what used to happen when we had the house in West Bergholt. It was not uncommon for us to be awake until after Dawn playing music in the bar but Denise has assured us that she is always up very early and is looking forward to seeing dawn. I think the forepeak bed will have something to say about that since it is so comfortable that we have had a number of light sleepers who claim they won’t sleep or who are up early find themselves knocking out the zzzzz until quite late in the morning. So it is no surprise to us when Denise emerges bleary-eyed three hours after dawn, another victory for the comfy Mariadz bed!

We clearly didn’t have that much to drink the night before since we are all up early and Maria already has the fishing rods out on another still, sunny and gorgeous day. We start to think about breakfast which of course will not be fish!

The batteries are in reasonable shape but with a huge requirement for hot water if we all shower, we decide to fire up the generator to provide hot water from its cooling system while the charger hammers power back into the batteries. After checking that the cooling system is working as expected I then switch on the electrical element too which will speed up the process.  I like to check the load while we are running the generator, I am convinced that the old generator was destroyed after 700 hours because it was constantly run at relatively little loads (I.e. 10%).  We generally have it as a minimum of 50% which is hopefully much better for it.

Denise and Kirk are looking to head back around lunchtime so that they can be back in time for the return of their sons who have been attempting the three peak challenge – the three tallest peaks in the UK in the space of 24 hours. A really hard task. They have also to return his new car that they borrowed 🙂

It’s gone mid day and the tide has turned again as the water rushes back into the river. Everyone is chilled and their have been no bites on the fishing lines, unless you count a small crab which decided to steal the bait. We are rally’s relaxed, fed and washed. In fact Denise, is dozing in the hammock so another triumph for Mariadz’s ability to get people to rest.

It is soon time to gather the belongings and return Denise and Kirk to Maldon. It’s probably half an hour earlier than when we went in yesterday so it will be tight but should be fine, or so we thought. In the interests of saving time and reducing the weight, Maria decides to remain on Mariadz which should make us faster. Now just to clarify, this in no way means Maria is heavy, I am not that brave and would quite reasonably fully expect to wake up next week if I suggested such a thing! I have emptied our las trip spare fuel can into the tank and we have about ten litres of fuel so I should top that up while in Maldon.

We make good speed on the way back to Maldon, but it is quite shallow….and now it is very shallow…. I hear a slight change in the outboard note, that will be mud then.  The electric tilt on the outboard comes into its own as a raise the prop as high as I can but we will still have half a mile to go. We have a portable Gardiner navigation device which is fitted to the rib and it claims that I should have two feet of water at this point but this clearly isn’t true as we stop dead on the mud in the middle of the channel. Maybe we should have left I think a little later. A trip least we are on a rising tide so we are not going to be left high and dry or stuck for too long.  We break out the one oar that comes with the walker bay rib, that wouldn’t be any use in an emergency. Kirk checks the depth and a fewminutes later we are free of the mud but we will go into Maldon very tentatively. Comically Kirk is still paddling with the oar but he is assisted by a 20hp engine so it isn’t too difficult. As we round the last bend into Maldon we are greeted by a small band of water and a lot of mud. There is no way we can get close to the pontoon. There is another pontoon slightly downstream but even that is 20-30 minutes away from having enough wate for us to land. Kirk dips his toe into the mud to see if it is walkable but even with a little weight on it, he isn’t getting enough resistance to give him confidence that he won’t sink up to his waist. So we are stuck in the boat and waiting for the tide. Now we have two anchors on the rib and I decide that to save fuel we will deploy an anchor while we wait. That works fine, once it gets a grip, but obviously looked quite strange from the banks of the river. Still it gave us a nice view of the Thames barges with Maldon behind, clearly that is why we did it! There is even a strip of mud around each of the Thames barges. Some very friendly gentlemen on these ask us if we are waiting to disembark and want to offer some help but we can’t work out a way we could get off and have to wait. It gives us ample time to consider that with the tide being an hour-ish later, we have effectively arrived in Maldon an hour and a half earlier in tides terms. One to remember for another time. The water is rising slowly and eventually we decide that we will do the whole marines beach approach and run Connie up the mud to the pontoon. On the first attempt I get deflected away from the pontoon and have to approach straighter. The second time we are bang on and nestle into the pontoon. We attach some lines and head up the pontoon to …. a locked gate. Oh! It looks climbable! So three fifty something’s climb the gate to get out, I’ll have to consider how I do that for the return.  We get some fuel and Kirk returns me to the gate I am able to clamber over and he can then pass me the fuel, my grab bag and some beautiful roses that’s they got for Maria, forgot and left in the car.

I am starting to get messages from Maria who is worried that my quick trip into Maldon seems to have taken an age, have I run out of fuel? It’s all good as I start the return leg and of course now I have nothing to worry about as the tide is coming in quickly.

One of Maria’s favourite films is Pretty Woman and one of the female characters dreams is to have a prince on a white horse come and save her which Richard Gere does in his limo holding a bunch of flowers. You can see where I am going here. I have worked out that I can do this in the rib.

With only one passenger, Connie gets us back really quickly and Maria is there sitting on the bathing platform with a drink ready for me. I do the whole Richard Gere thing before mildly panicking as I see two fishing lines in the water…. that could have been embarrassing.

In my absence even more boats have anchored including Amarelle, a beautiful motor boat from Ipswich which we have nicknamed rhubarb and custard because of its colour scheme. There are also three boats rafted together on a single anchor. Now I know it isn’t windy and I’m sure it is perfectly safe but I just don’t get it. The one deployed anchor will not be sized for three boats so I am grateful that should they drag, they will slip by us nicely since we are not on their line. I guess you shouldn’t judge people by your own standards and they settle down for their own fun evening.

We have invited John and Linda from Amarelle over for a cheeky sundowner and they are about to row over despite my offer to come and pick them up. Russ and Sarah also join us and we have an entertaining early evening bathed in sunshine. John and Linda return to Amarelle, but the party continues on the bow of Mariadz. Music is playing and there is the obligatory Amy Winehouse songs sung at the island 🙂

A few years ago, Maria and I recorded our little party piece of Islands in the Stream, as a form of motorhome karaoke. Unfortunately, Warner music decided that Maria sounded too much like Dolly Parton and had the soundtrack removed as a breach of copyright. I did ask them to reinstate it or sign us up but never got a reply. On this particular evening there has clearly been too much alcohol…..It is time! Dolly and Kenny aka Mariadz are in full voice – a Capella – ban that, Warner Music! 🙂 I believe it goes some way to demonstrating that we are not deserving of the record deal quite yet…..However, we do rather better a little later when we play our friend from Barbados, Buggy Nhakante, a fantastic reggae star.

So despite running the tranquility of the anchorage (apologies for that!), it has been a fun day and our last before the journey home to Ipswich on what promises to be the best day of the weekend weather-wise.

We’re up early in the morning but there is quite a bit of packing away to do before we can head off. There is a little wind so we may be able to sail too which is another level of tidying up and one we generally do anyway before venturing out to sea, well you never know when the perfect sailing conditions are going to arrive! A rib comes round and asks us if we have jump leads, apparently one of the motor boats has lost all batteries overnight and can’t start their engine. I do have some somewhere…but after much searching I decide I have taken them off the boat and they are probably I one of the vehicles back in Ipswich. I am a little intrigued as to how this has happened but we don’t find out. It does make me think about our own setup. We effectively have three distinct areas of batteries: our domestic and service bank (880Ah which covers all use, winches, windlass, navigation etc), a dedicated engine start battery and a dedicated generator start battery. We also have the ability to cross these last two over which means we should be able to start the engine, or generator, even if it’s dedicated battery is flat. I am satisfied that what has happened to the motorboaters shouldn’t happen to us, once again loads of redundancy, especially if I bring the jump leads back! Russ offers to take off his own engine battery and lend it so that the engine can be started, it must be a much simpler task then extricating ours!

At the same time, Maria is chatting up two gentlemen who drift by fishing. She offers them a cup of tea or a beer, (at this time darling!) but they decline as they try to get their rig sorted. Just one of those random events on the water but it tickles Maria.

We have been playing with the rib this weekend and it’s time to get it back up into its place under the davits. We now have our new cover which goes under the rib and over the davits….and there lies the problem. We have to get the cover under the far side of the rib witch we can’t reach except when we are in the rib and then we need to make sure that the cover doesn’t get trapped between the davits and the rib as it is lifted. Maria and I set about our task, sometimes with me climbing onto the davits and also using our boat hook. We have the rib up and I have even got the cover over the engine so we are looking good, as Russ and Sarah gaze on from their inflatable perplexed! Now where are the straps that go under the rib when it is up….of course they are in the rib. Before starting all over again, we decide to see if we can slip them out of the boat and down the outside using the boat hook. I fully expect them to gather nicely in a fold of the cover on the far side but we’ll give it a go. Today we are lucky and I can just see them peaking out of the other side and Maria is able to adeptly grab them with the boat hook. After thirty minutes of messing about we have the cover on and it looks perfect so Paul from Dolphin was absolutely right in that it can be done whilst at anchor. Let’s just say there may have been a couple of doubters over the previous thirty minutes.

We say our goodbyes before heading off and then Mariadz catches someone else out. Sailing boats use seawater to cool the engine down and this comes out from an exhaust pipe above the water line, hence why there is always a splashing of water from the exhaust when the engine is running. If there isn’t then the engine is not being cooled which is a big problem. The Moody 54 has a water separator in the exhaust and the water goes out under the hull. This has led a number of kind and frantic people to wildly gesticulate to us that there is no water coming out. Russ can now add himself to that list, while Mariadz sniggers behind her hand 🙂

We depart late morning recognising that we will be against the tide the whole way but to some extent hoping we can arrive at Ipswich around about high tide and not have to be delayed in the lock at all since it will be open. It is very still as we proceed down the Blackwater and we see more people out early on a bank holiday enjoying the day, including a group of speed boats who have stopped on a beach which is a sand bank exposed by the low tide. They’ll only get a few hours but it looks pretty cool on a scorching day.

It’s still although the wind is due to pick up a little later. So I guess another opportunity to be the camera out and take photos of everyone! I do have more so if anyone recognises themselves give me a shout, I may have more pictures of you i can send.

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We head out of the Blackwater and see a very strange sight, it looks like a flying boat on the horizon but seems to be a fin keeled boat that has been caught on the tide. It seems to be standing proud but looks very strange, I’d love to know what the story was here. It could be an optical illusion and be a bulge keel sitting comfortably on its twin keels but we couldn’t tell from where we were and it would have been far too shallow for Mariadz to get close safely. The wind has picked up a bit and having had a sail jam last time out, we are keen to make sure that the mainsail is back to its normal trouble free self. So we have full main and staysail out as we turn up the wallet and of course the wind is pretty much on the nose. However my wind instruments are showing this a little differently. In fact they are showing the wind to one side and the sail is showing it on the other side. Well that will not do. The great thing about our self tacking staysail is that it gets pushed to an end of the track depending on where the wind is, when it is in the middle the apparent wind is dead centre. I use this to help with the adjustment although the apparent wind shown on my instruments is based on speed through the water rather than speed over ground, the difference should be negligible.  I have adjusted it and we can now see just how close to the wind we are as we travel up the wallet.

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Amarelle left the anchorage after us but has caught us up and goes past, they will definitely catch the lock on free flow. I think Maria normally lets motor boats go when she is racing but she would still like me to sort these sails out and get a little more speed to catch them up….no surprises there then. Or in the result as they disappear over the horizon. We eventually hear them call into the lock, an hour ahead of us.

We are nearing the end of the wallet when the AIS goes mad. A boat off our bow has turned toward us and the technology is telling us that he is on a collision course. We adjust our course to avoid any problems despite clearly having sail up and the other boat is under motor only. The other yacht changes course again and is again going to hit us. Can he not see us trying to get out of the way. I check the AIS which gives me all of the details of the boat in question. Hmmm, Motion. We know a boat called motion and as we get closer we see that it is our friend Mark from B pontoon at Ipswich Haven. We have had a glorious weekend and so now he decides to go out, planning to be down to pyefleet for a few days. You can tell we were concerned, no photos. Oh and he didn’t have any sail up so no point.

At the top of the wallet we turn into medusa and it is like someone has hit the turbo. The wind is now hitting us from the starboard side and Mariadz picks up her skirts and flies. This is good because we haven’t made good time so far and it is looking like we may miss the lock gates, not a major problem but a little annoying.

We are making great progress but still need to keep an eye out as there are a number of lobster pots and these are harder to see when you have all sail out. Still, mmmm, Lobster, maybe we should go to the Alma again soon….

We make our way into the Orwell and shortly after the wind dies. It’s time to take the sails in since they are doing nothing and we don’t want them damaged by flogging. Maria is disappointed that she hasn’t seen any seals or porpoises today and so focuses on seeing cormorant, which is a little easier!

As we arrive at the Orwell bridge we are close to high tide and another sailing vessel is having engine trouble.  Before we can offer assistance another boat has come out of Ipswich to help them. We’ve done this before and it was interesting going through the lock rafted to someone else and then dropping them off on a hammerhead. But someone else will take the honour today.

We pass through the lock on the last of freeflow and as we arrive at our berth our friend and next door neighbour Linda comes out to take a line and help us come in.

It’s the end of another magnificent weekend as we settle down to a still, sunny evening in our home berth.

So on the back of our first weekend, the weather held on and we decided that another jaunt down river would be the perfect way to recover from a hard week of work.  Maria was working from home on the Friday and was able to get the boat prepped and I finished early so that I could get home and we could get on our way in time to spend a couple of nights on anchor before returning in perfect wind conditions early on Sunday. In fact for mos of the weekend, the wind is blowing up to 20knots from the South. Not a concern for us at anchor or when we are sailing, we have done both in much worse than that.

The anchoring would require the hand signal approach we had developed previously since, although I had acquired the replacement remote for the windlass, I would not risk fitting it while the anchor was down in case I did something to stop the other control or windlass from working.  That would be bad so I will fit it when we have a little time in harbour. That way if I mess it up, I can get it sorted without having to come up with a way of raising the anchor by hand (or winch)

Our plan worked well to start off. Maria had done well to get the boat ready, got bait from the fishing tackle shop and collected me from the station to save us another ten minutes. Engine started and Maria is calling into the lock to request a lock out. We’re in luck, we are catching the end of freeflow which means the water is at the same level as the river and we can go straight through the lock, as long as the light is green.

Heading down river is fine although we are taking it in turns to do some work, whether taking calls, processing emails or working on our laptops. It’s very quiet down the river as everyone else is starting to eat out of work.  The wind is a little close on the nose so we decide to motor down so that we can be sure to arrive at our chosen anchoring spot in good time.  This will give us the opportunity to relax and enjoy the last of the evening before the sun goes down.

As we approach Felixstowe, the wind blows up a little more and is a bit more than forecast.  We discuss our plans and consider an alternative of spending the night on halfpenny pier in Harwich. This is well protected from a southerly wind. As we round the corner of Felixstowe we approach the confluence of the Orwell and the Stour.  There are only two boats on the outer part of the pier which normally means that there is space. However the motorboat in particular looks something like 60 feet and it is right in the middle of the western half of the pier. We call into the excellent harbourmaster on their mobile phone. It is clear as we get close that even moving the two boats around won’t give a great amount of space for Mariadz who can take up 60 feet herself. The harbourmaster suggests we could raft up to the motorboat but at twenty tonnes we are concerned that it will not be a comfortable night for any of us. Also we imagine that they would get quite upset at someone rafting up.  We revert to plan A and head down the river Stour to one of our chosen anchorages. In the Stour we have a few options, we can anchor near the top of the river opposite Harwich Parkeston Quay, we can return to the Holbrook Bay area and anchor where we were the previous weekend or slightly further up where we traditionally anchor near the cardinal buoy. We decide to anchor near where we were last weekend where the water is a little deeper. With our new system and Maria controlling the anchor, we are anchored in no time with anchor float showing where we are, snubbers protecting the windlass from damage and the anchor ball flying.

At the time it is wind against tide and when the wind is in the opposite direction to the flow of the water, the chop is a little worse.  We are hardly moving but the water is not smooth. We know we are comfortably anchored for the night and settle down for a healthy dinner of steak and cooked vegetables, and by cooked vegetables I don’t mean potatoes cut into long fingers and deep fried!

In the summer and especially at anchor, we often stay in the cockpit watching the world go by, chatting and listening to music. The cats are settled and like being close as they sleep. We are all really relaxed. With the built in stereo system still temporarily unavailable, see later blog, we are using the amazon echo to play the music. This has the added advantage of being voice controlled :). It’s a lovely evening and we may have enjoyed a couple of drinks and maybe even a little dance after it got dark but thankfully it is not too late a night since we are both shattered from the working week. Just before dark, one of the scout training yachts decides to anchor near to us, actually in our traditional spot near to the cardinal buoy. They have a reputation of bouncing off people but we haven’t personally experienced it and the skippers seem very nice when you meet them. Apparently, on this occasion they were concerned that they may have disturbed our tranquility in the evening. They clearly don’t know Mariadz at all 🙂

The next morning there is some trepidation as we approach the scales but we decide to weigh in and survey the damage since we are both meant to be dieting! We are both pleasantly surprised to see our weight has gone down a lot over the last few days. At least now we know what we need to do…. 🙂

It is not too late when’s we get up, and it is a beautiful day with quite a bit of wind. In short perfect sailing conditions. So Mariadz in the spirit of rebellion settles down for a chill day. Maria decides that today is the day she is going to catch our dinner. Now I don’t think this sounds too difficult, surely you go to the freezer, pick out the packet, put it on the side – dinner caught! But apparently, Maria has different ideas. She has gone to the freezer as I thought but she gets out the squid and puts it next to the worms, she is fishing for supper! Now with our standard amount of success in this area, it is certain that we are going to starve but it is ok since we have food available on the “off chance” Maria is unsuccessful.

It takes Maria some time to set up the two rods but she is pottering around having a great time and looking relaxed without a care in the world so I am not going to complain. It’s not as if she’s going to catch anything so it will be a nice relaxing day!

As the afternoon progresses, Maria has lost some bait so something is going on under the surface of the water. And then suddenly, the rod moves, and Maria gets excited…. she heads over to the port side rod and wow, she has only gone and caught something. It is time for Maria’s caught a fish song! Now the interesting thing about Maria’s “I caught a fish” song is that apart from the “I have caught a fish” chorus, every other lyric in the song starts with the letter “f” and is a word normally deleted in polite company. Unfortunately I don’t have video evidence, not that I could show until after the watershed! But it’s ok, because she follows up this crowd favourite with a haunting second song, now this one I do have on video!

She’s caught a whiting and is a very happy and proud girl.  The rod is ready to go again and she is on a roll.  Maria catches a couple more smaller fish but decides to put these back. Now normally when they are a little smaller, Maria struggles to remove the hook and fatally damages the fish. Sometimes it is still moving and she hopefully returns it to the water where it lays on the surface until some passing seagull puts it out of its misery. More recently I have been asked to despatch them. She is on a roll though and really enjoying herself, work is something that effects other people. That’s how a weekend should be. Then late on, Maria has more luck! This time it’s a larger sea bass, and we have video evidence…..

Clearly I was very confident about Maria’s prowess with a fishing rod and not at all surprised so we had the meat for a BBQ already out on the side, so no fish supper tonight! Another relaxed evening chatting and, it has to be said, that since Maria’s weight loss, dancing has featured a lot again.  She’s happy 🙂

The next morning we are to return to Ipswich and it is a glorious day: bright sunshine, and a southerly wind of about 20 knots. Perfect wind to get Mariadz going and we can have a nice relaxed sail home. The boat is ready to go and we get the anchor up in the now familiar way with Maria controlling the windlass from my instructions. To my knowledge this is the only time Maria has ever obeyed my instructions 🙂

We have decided that we will sail and drift all the way home today, there is no rush and although we have a few chores we want to get done, as long as we are back before 3pm all is fine. It’s a day for all three sails as the reasonably steady wind comes across our decks from the starboard side. The staysail is deployed first and comes out easily, the lubrication the other week has done a great job.  Next for the main. This is normally a one person job, keeping an eye on the sail as the winch pulls it out.  The sound of the winch is always a good tell-tale for how it is coming out, as the winch starts to struggle you normally pull on the outhaul to ease it. We have done this consistently for four years while we have owned the boat.  That said, when we first got her we had a couple of mild sail jams as the main was furled into the mast. However, we soon found a technique for avoiding these by keeping the tension on the main as it furled.  This and the boom being horizontal stopped any creases in the sail which could then cause a jam. As I say we have had four years of jam-free sailing so the technique seems to work.  Until today! The sail is a third out when it folds against itself and jams solid! I notice that we have a crease and the sail has stopped coming out from the mast. Not good.  The sail will not come out and will not go back in again. The problem area is too high to reach so I will have to use a combination of pull from the outhaul, jiggling from the furling mechanism and leverage from pulling down on the sail occasionally to see if I can shift the fold that is jamming the mechanism. Initial results are not good but I persevere with the sail under tension, trying to adjust the angle of attack on the crease. There is movement but there is still a crease at the top of the sail.  The problem area is moving up the mast so I decide that with the wind veering slightly behind a slight change of course will allow me to safely deploy the whole sail and remove the crease once and for all. It is slowly coming out just using sail tension and the furler now and Maria is keeping a watchful eye as well as keeping an eye on our course and other water users.

We’re clear and I even bring in a little of the main just to check that the fold doesn’t reappear. It’s all good. So we then turn our attention to the head sail and with roughly half of these flying we are sailing comfortably.

But the episode of the sail jam makes you think, what would we have done if we hadn’t been able to clear the jam.  The answer lies in my trusty red rope with a loop in one end.  This rope is the equivalent of James Milner, or Fabian Delph, for those who like their football. It’s a do anything, equally well, rope. It has acted as a harness for an outboard, a replacement main sheet holding the boom in place, a dog lead as well as any number of uses where a short strong line was necessary. Today, as it has previously, it would have been a sail tie. We would have loosened off the outhaul, trusty red line would then have pulled all of the offending sail into the mast and with a couple of wraps would have held the sail in place with little showing. But all of that isn’t necessary today and we can enjoy our sail up the Stour. As we get up towards Harwich the wind gets a little stronger and to be fair at this stage we would normally have reefed all of the sails to reduce the power from the wind driving Mariadz. We generally reef the sails a lot and early, Mariadz is more than capable of handling that much power, although she sails more comfortably and faster when nice and steady rather than heavily heeled.

We make the turn at Felixstowe towards Ipswich with the wind directly behind us. This disappoints Clyde who was really enjoying the sea air.

There are quite a few larger yachts behind us in the forty something range. Now we are very clearly cruising sailors, we have never raced a yacht or any sailing vessel competitively and to be fair I don’t think we have anything like the sailing skills to do this well. However that does mean that Maria is not competitive, and maybe me too! Although we are not racing, whenever there are two boats sailing Ona river that are reasonably well matched a race shall ensue. Maria’s view is very similar to Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, when faced with an army of Orcs – “you shall not pass!”. This is normally accompanied by a soundtrack of “Ad, Ad…” any time someone gains on us. Mariadz is not the fastest boat but of course being a little longer than a number of other boats helps to keep her ahead. Of course, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always switch on the iron sail, with its water free exhaust, meaning no-one would know…. not that we would ever do that!

The trip up river is relaxing but the wind has veered a little to the West which means it is slightly in our faces as we get to the top of the river. It is also intermittent which is caused by the the hills and trees on the banks which funnel the wind, giving changes of wind direction, spots where it is very blowy and other spots where it seems still.  This presents some challenges for us trying to keep on course up the winding river when we are tight to the wind. As we go past Wolverstone, conditions and our angle to the wind improve and we are clear now until the Orwell bridge where we must call into the lock, take the sails down and prepare for mooring.

We haven’t seen many other yachts for a while, obviously laying in a trail of dust behind us! But up ahead, we have Lister Light again, that’s two weekends on the trot. They are drifting nicely down river having a leisurely sail with Sally at the helm. To be fair I really wanted to pass them on the “wrong” side so we could get a better lit picture but at least the got a good one of us just before we took the sails down.

Now clearly , we are very careful putting the mainsail away and are even more vigilant in checking for folds as the sail goes away. It seems to curl away fine and so we breath a sigh of relief although the true test will be when we next take the sail out! The lock is easy and soon we are in our berth, tied up nicely (that’s Mariadz is tied up rather than Maria, by the way) and thinking about dinner. Hang on, don’t we have two gorgeous fish we can eat….straight on the BBQ in foil with our own Italian olive oil, lemon and vegetables.

Accompanied with fish skewers and a salad it is very healthy and more than we can eat. Please ignore the optical illusion of a cheeky glass of white!

so the end of a cracking, relaxing weekend. The best part of it? The fact that nothing new had broken…but I still haven’t fixed all the breakages from the last weekend away so it’s a small mercy.

It is unbelievable that we are already in the middle of April and there hasn’t been a single good day for sailing! Normally we would have had a few, potentially chilly, eeekends by now. I remember from when I played a lot of cricket you would always get some unseasonal warm days early in the season, normally just before a May was rained off completely though.

In previous years we have gone a reasonable distance too especially at Easter, maybe to Ramsgate or across the channel. Going to France is more tricky now because then the cats couldn’t come.

So, at last, our sailing season has started even though it is really late this year. The weather for this weekend was meant to be cool with a very light Southerly wind so not much to get excited about sailing-wise but a great opportunity to get out, check the boat is working well and have some chill time. So we decided to head down river and anchor in the River Stour that is the border between Essex and Suffolk,

We were hoping to get away early on a Friday but unfortunately I arrived back too late from work so we couldn’t sail down to Harwich to see off our friends Lars and Laura on Sweet Dream, a beautiful Island Packet, as they set off to Norway before starting a trip round the world in January 2019. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat………, sorry Clyde! Since we hadn’t had the opportunity to properly say farewell, we decided to drive to Harwich and meet them for their last supper before they left at the Alma. The Alma is a lovely pub that sells very fresh lobster and beautiful cuts of beef, all listed on a blackboard, when it’s gone, it’s gone! The food as always was really nice. We had a cracking evening chatting which was capped off beautifully with a quick dance to a live band – Lars and Laura know how to make an exit. The obligatory exchange of a few presents including our crew t-shirts for our friends. In the picture is their very own “Anne Plummer”, she’s a very popular artist, don’t you know!

After a good nights rest, we decide to be up early to get our chores done prior to going out on the boat.  We have refilled with water and fuel as well as running all of our pre-trip checks.  One of the jobs since it was our first trip of the year was to go around all of the blocks lubricating them. Last year we noticed that there was a lot of power required to bring in the head and staysail. This year I have lubricated everything I can reach including all of the guides for the furling line that runs it from the bow to the stern. Let’s see if that helps. So Mariadz is well lubricated, no change there, and we are ready to go. We have timed going through the lock just before high tide which means that we can go through the lock without stopping, with permission of course and only on the green light.

The engine hasn’t had a proper run for six months or so and is slightly smokey, we will need to keep an eye on it but I suspect that this just needs a good run.

At last, after six months of confinement to Ipswich, we are out and heading down the river and it is a pleasant daynot much wind but nice to be out. The trip down the Orwell is uneventful and we make the turn into the Stour. Now what little wind we have is right on the beam and so we decide to get all of the sails out to check that they are ok. Everything comes out fine but we are against the tide with little wind and so keep the engine running to ensure we can make a sensible pace. Of course the key will be how they go away and whether I need to use all my strength!

The cats are incredibly comfortable and also grateful that we have got them such comfortable new seating in the cockpit. This of course means that the two seating areas that we had set up seem to be feline spots. It does amaze us though how comfortable the cats are on the boat.  No matter what the conditions, they seem happy and relaxed.  When it is bad they stay quite close to us for reassurance but when it is a nice day like today they stretch lazily and chill. We have a number of friends who have commented that they don’t necessarily believe in reincarnation but if they did, and could choose, they would like to return as Maria’s cat – spoilt isn’t the word!

After an hour of motor sailing, we are approaching our anchorage at Holbrook on the North side of the river under the watchful eye of the magnificent Royal Hospital School. It is time to get the sails away so fingers crossed. The smaller staysail flies back in with relatively little effort but the real test will be the much larger headsail. The difference lubrication makes is amazing, the sails go back quite easily.

So the sails are away and we can now think about anchoring.  Maria selects the spot as I am forward preparing the anchor, anchor float, snubber line and the anchor ball.  The anchor float that tells us where the anchor is located is fixed with its ten metre line to the anchor itself.  This has the added advantage of acting as a trip line if the anchor gets fouled.  Maria is pretty much ready so I decide to ease the anchor off it’s stowage using the wired remote. Nothing, not even a click of a solenoid.  Hmmm.  I know I have flicked the switch on for the windlass down on the electricity panel -that is normally what I have done wrong when something doesn’t work! I immediately go back to Maria and explain the situation and also to check the anchor controls at the steering position – let’s at least try and isolate the problem.  The issue I have here is that when we got the boat, as mentioned previously, pretty much everything needed fixing….. except the windlass that brings the anchor chain in.  That had been replaced at great expense just before we got her! So with some trepidation I press the button on the steering column and the windlass springs to life and the anchor starts to deploy.  Huge sigh of relief, it’s “only” a remote that I need to replace! However, we like to deploy the anchor in stages so I need to be back on the bow while we do this. We quickly agree some obvious hand signals for up, down and stop. I think Maria has some hand signals of her own planned too!

It is quite high tide and we are in a nice spot with about seven metres of water so we will be perfectly safe even when the tide is out.  We start deploying the heavy rocna anchor and our the chain in ten metre increments letting the boat settle after each one.  This helps with getting the anchor set and also stops piling a lot of chain on top of itself is a cone or on top of the anchor.  Despite it not expecting to be windy, we deploy thirty metres of chain so we can be confident that Mariadz is going nowhere. As we get to thirty metres I put a hook attached to the middle of our snubber line through a link of the chain and tie it off on both bow cleats.  This takes any pressure off the windlass hopefully meaning we won’t have to replace it in the future! It also balances the load across both bow cleats and means that the anchor chain doesn’t rub against the hull as we get pulled around the anchor. Lots of great reasons to do that then. Letting a little more chain takes the tension off the windlass. I can then tie, three further snubbers onto the chain which can take the pressure even if the hook falls off the chain. Probably a little too much redundancy but you just get into the habit. The final job is to raise the anchor ball that tells everyone during the day that we are anchored.  This is attached half way up a spinnaker line run down to the deck, we hoist it about ten feet up so that it is easily seen.  Obviously at night the anchor light at the top of the mast is illuminated so that people know where we are. These signs usually work very well and people know where you are and keep clear.  Unless of course they are a blue hulled scouts boat, in which case you need to switch on the spreader spotlights and everything else you have got before they hit you!

Mariadz is settled nicely, there is a very light breeze and a gentle soothing movement of the boat, it’s mid afternoon. We decide to stay up in the cockpit as Maria prepares the feast of fish which is our lunch and dinner, or so we thought. As you can see from the picture, Maria has a little furry friend. Now Clyde is rather partial to prawns and demands them as an almost daily treat.  When Maria brought the platter up, Clyde stirred. Ah, treat time and wow what a great selection. What shall I have first mummy? Maria of course obliges and starts feeding him lobster.  LOBSTER! Is there another word that is more than spoilt… hmm a very lucky cat.

Anyway, let’s just talk about the weather…..when the weather is good on a yacht, there is no better place. In the winter we are cooped up down below catching up on films and box sets.  In the summer, the TV is rarely on and we sit up in the cockpit listening to music.  This is the first time that we have had the opportunity to use the cockpit properly with the cushions that James has made us, one word – excellent.

So the music is playing as we chat.

Today is the day of the grand national though and the one day a year when Maria likes to gamble – except for the lottery and the annual trip to the casino. We choose roughly nautical and lifestyle names for the horses and we have our four.  Last year Maria won so she is relaxed and confident. Obviously our interest in the race is over by the first circuit and as the winner wins by a small margin, Maria announces that she was going to choose that one….that’ll be my fault then!

It’s getting to the end of the day and we have been anchored for over six hours,  usually at this stage the electrics, such as the fridge and freezer, have started to take a toll on the batteries but not tonight. With our new solar power set up our batteries are at 100% as the sun goes down – we like that!

The sun is going down and as we look down the river we see lister Light with the young Thompson family on board. yeah that ones for you Sally 🙂 you owe us. So our neighbours who are 250 metres away from us in Ipswich are the same distance from us in the stour. But wow doesn’t their boat look great in that light.

While the Thompson’s have their own great evening, we are settled down listening to music. It’s a lovely evening with a variety of music and we go to bed at a reasonable time. Of course with Maria that is any time before 4am – but it was early even by these standards!

It’s not an early start, which gives an idea of how late the previous night was, but as we get up we find that there is a thick fog with 50-100 metres visibility. So we will need to put the fog lights on and continue to drive at 70+ miles an hour! Not quite.

A very thick fog means it is a day for AIS and radar. AIS is great, it tells you the course and speed of larger ships, whilst also telling you how close how close they will get to you. We have an AIS transponder so we are sharing the same information with everyone else, if they are looking out for it, going through a major port it does gives some reassurance that we are suddenlyWe leave it till noon to go so that there is a chance to burn off and it does seem to clear.

Until we get to Felixstowe. Pea souper. Fifty metres visibility with no idea what big ships are moving. Radar is helping and ais is also sounding but the hardest is finding the buoys so that we know where we are – thankfully we know this area quite well.

But of course this could be about to to get much worse in the Orwell where the vessels aren’t very big with no AIS transponder or a big radar shadow. This is going to be very stressful. But as we move away the fog lifts and we now have a few hundred metres of visibility before it lifts again and we can see up to a mile. Stress over.

The return journey is all under power and the engine is a lot happier now, not much smoke for a start.  Mariadz has a split exhaust which means we still get people frantically trying to stop us at the dock because of the lack of water coming out of the exhaust.  It does help when we motorsail too when people are amazed at how fast a larger yacht can go with so little wind. 🙂

We come up the river and arrive at the lock gates.  While we wait for the water levels to equalise, we meet a couple with a new to them boat who will be staying at Ipswich. We recommend b pontoon – best, beautiful and boozy! All the “B”s.

Coming in and Maria has everything under control. I have set up dual lines on the bow prior to entering the lock so I have swapped over the mid line, the first line we generally get ashore. Linda our very helpful neighbour comes over to give us a hand and takes the mid line for me and I glance aft to notice that the stern cleat is bare, I haven’t moved that line.  What a wally! I’m sure there would have been panic in our first few years of sailing but I tell Maria the situation, not that she can do anything about it and quickly swap the line over. Lasso the cleat from th deck of Mariadz and we are back where we should have been.

We get into our routine of adjusting lines and getting the power on and we are all tied up adjacent to our steps.  The other boat we have just seen has been put on b pontoon and so we give them a hand before settling down for food.

The weather has brightened up noticeably and so it must be bbq time. Obviously that changes the weather and of course it starts to rain but not before I get the rail mount fitted and the bbq fitted. Really convenient, now if only the food would cook quicker!

So a weekend away and as is common on a boat, a list of maintenance jobs: stereo needs replacing, the usb charger in saloon has stopped working and the remote for windlass. Ah sailing life, going to beautiful places to fix your boat!

It has been a tradition that Mariadz goes to Burnham-on-Crouch for the carnival late in September.  This coincides with a meeting of fellow Moody owners so an opportunity to catch up with friends. The marina also have a marque setup with lunch and a live band, Street Life, who we were lucky to have play at our wedding back in 2010 and we consider them to be friends.  This also seems to be a traditional place where we meet new friends.  We are invariably at the entrance to the marina and this seems to be a spot where you are seen.  This has resulted in many good friendships being formed including Amanda and Mark when they first collected their yacht Serenity, Stig on Wild Dream 2 who seems to share the tradition of visiting Burnham for carnival and Martine who had a beautiful Hardy, called Kismet.  Lots of reasons to head down the coast and into the Crouch then.

Maria and I decided we would get down to Burnham nice and early and have a few days there.  With the communications setup we have with the boat wifi extender, a mifi and now an aerial booster for the mifi, we are always connected and Maria could continue to work as usual while I guided the boat.  The journey to Burnham on Crouch from Ipswich is about 45 miles and it is ten miles to get to Landguard which is a cardinal buoy that we consider as the start of all of our routes.  Maria was very keen to get to Burnham early in the day so that Mariadz (rather than Maria) could be tied up for the afternoon. Unfortunately this meant that the tides in the Wallet wouldn’t be ideal, and neither was the wind.  It would also mean going across the shallow Spitway at Gunfleet on or around low tide.  Mariadz is more than capable of handling the weather although it would mean that we would probably be a little slower than our usual passage planning speed of seven knots and we would be especially careful at the shallow sections.  In order to offset this we decided to leave the night before and pick up a mooring buoy near the bottom of the Orwell which would gain us an hour.  A nice early start the next day and all would be fine…..

The provisions were on board and we were pretty much ready to go but it is getting later.  Maria gently pulled Mariadz out of her berth to head towards the lock and Mark from Motion took a pic for us.  Shortly after the picture was taken we noticed that the satellite dish was still up, just ahead of the mast!  Better get that in before we go too far down the river!

The trip down the river is uneventful with few craft on the river and within the hour we are approaching the mooring buoys but with a strong southerly wind in our faces.  We discuss the approach and think that the wind is going to be stronger than the tide so to approach into the wind so that Maria can stop Mariadz easily.  After a couple of failed attempts to pick up the buoy Maria suggests we approach from the other side.  The buoys opposite Suffolk Yacht Harbour have a thick loop of rope and one of these had another thin long line attached to it, I assume to help with picking it up. That restricts the use of the bow thruster then, we don’t want a rope getting caught in there.  I have our stainless extendable boat hook and I get a good grip of the line for the buoy, unfortunately the hook then decides to detach itself from the pole.  It is ok though since it is still caught up in the thick line on the buoy.  Go and get the other boat hook while Maria spins Mariadz round, pick up the line, grab the old hook, thread the line and we are all good!  Maria does her part perfectly and has the buoy perfectly mid-ships where I can reach it.  I start to lift the buoy and the hook is coming up and just as I reach out to grab it, it drops off and into the Orwell where it joins an identical complete stainless steel boat hook that we dropped there a few years ago!  Oh well, another replacement hook required.  Still I thread the line and tie us close to the buoy.  Maria is a little concerned since we are lying quite close to the next buoy which has a catamaran on it but I agree that I will check it at the change of tide a bit later in the evening.  In the end we remain far enough away from the catamaran despite the slightly different swing characteristics compared to Mariadz.  It is a breezy evening but the next day is clear although we didn’t get started too early, no surprise there.  Based on our later departure time, we are likely to reach the spitway shortly after low tide so at least we will be on a rising tide if we do find it too shallow. It’s 9am by the time we reach the Languard buoy, and we head towards Medusa while being on lobster pot lookout (this area is notorious for badly marked pots and fishing nets strewn across the channel). Progress is slow and there are very few other boats out.  We are against tide and wind and we travel down the wallet quite slowly (for us).  I’m not too worried since we will arrive at the Spitway at the bottom of Gunfleet sands after low tide as expected and it does give us a chance to get some good shots of boats coming the other way with the wind and tide.

I have also had the opportunity to tidy our fenders on this trip and eight of them fit perfectly on the two mast pulpits (granny bars).  Martin, our yachtmaster and friend, would be proud that we hadnt left them on the deck!

We arrive at the top of the Spitway which is marked with a single buoy and a corresponding buoy at the other end.  When we have no fears over water levels we will quite often cut the corner between the buoy and Gunfleet sands where the water is quite deep.  This saves a bit of time and I have never had any shallow water issues but at this state of tide we are going to take the text book route.  We are lined up and I am behind the wheel, unusually, but this will allow me to take over from the autopilot quickly if we have an issue.  The water is smooth, which is helpful. At least I won’t need to consider the wave height when thinking of the depth of water but it is getting shallower.

Our depth instruments are set to actual depth of water rather than water under the keel.  This means that the alarm goes off at three metres depth (over a metre under the keel)rather than nearly five metres which it would be if it was tuned to depth under the keel, and at five metres the alarm would always be going off on the East Coast.  We have barely started the passage across the Spitway and the alarm goes off for three metres depth and the depth is still going down.  It is now in the low twos for a long time but as we approach the middle of the Spitway the level goes below two metres.  Mariadz is a shaol keel which means she only draws 1.8M, although she will draw the same if she is heeled.  When calibrating the depth I had also added 20cm safety margin but when I see the depth touch 1.8M I am getting a little concerned.  I recheck and we are directly between the buoys but this is less water than I was expecting.  Fortunately this doesn’t last for long and soon the depth is increasing as we exit the Spitway.  I am now wondering whether my usual “short-cut” route might actually be preferable and deeper.  Certainly something to check the next time we go through.

We turn and head towards the River Crouch, going between the mud banks at it’s entrance.  The River Crouch seems very long when it starts at the mud and it is not the most picturesque river but the advantage is the opportunity to see seals bathing on the mud. Today there are relatively few, we have seen nearly a hundred before but there was a nice group gathered for a coffee morning and chat.  Soon after this we see an ocean rowing boat.  We later discover that this is team Kung Fu Cha Cha who are intending to be the only Chinese team in the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge this year.  They seemed to be doing pretty well on their warm up run up the crouch and the AIS track showed good speed :).  We will definitely be following this team in the upcoming race.

There is quite a stiff breeze as we go up the river and we have put some sail out to provide better balance and a little extra speed.  We see some other boats coming the other way,

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as we negotiate the northern channel into the crouch adjacent to Buxey sands and everyone is exchanging friendly waves.

The cats are their normal relaxed selves, sitting in the cockpit being chilled as we motorsail in.

The wind is now blowing quite hard from the South and we start to think about the approach to Burnham.  We intend to get the sails away before we get amongst the moorings at Burnham where the channel thins out which will give me lots of time to get the lines and fenders sorted out.  It is now lunchtime and I call into the marina using the phone, we are too far away for the radio.  Bruce answers and explains that the minor issue he had with a boat in our booked berth has been overcome and we are clear to take the hammerhead.  Maria and I then discuss our approach.  We are only a little after low tide and so there are shallow elements near the entrance of Burnham and we will need to be careful, no cutting the corners today!  Maria realises that she will have to come in and as she passes between the entrance poles, she will have to turn hard to starboard and then let the wind push Mariadz onto the pontoon controlling her with the bow thruster and using the engine to line her up with the hammerhead.  Maria is a little apprehensive in the twenty knot wind but she handles the boat well and I am confident that we will do fine if we communicate well.  On the final approach into the marina, the water is shallow and the alarm goes off.  For one second we are thinking we may run into the mud at the entrance and be stuck for some time waiting to be floated off by the tide – you know every man and his dog would have chosen that time to come into the marina – and you don’t want to be the gnome greeting everyone at the entrance!  There are no such concerns as Maria negotiates the last of the approach and puts the wheel hard to starboard before starting to take the speed off the boat.  A bit of straightening up with the bow thruster and minor adjustment to line up with the hammerhead and we drift gently into position.  I step off and we are tied quite quickly.  A little after lunchtime but Maria gets her afternoon moored or tied up….lucky girl.

The E/F pontoon hammerhead is our usual and favoured berth at Burnham but the pontoon feels shorter than we remember, we are therefore overhanging on both sides so we will need to think carefully about how we tie up.  I catch up with Bruce who explains that another similar sized boat will come in the next day and could we make this easier by moving forward when they come in before returning to our normal position afterwards.  We absolutely understand the issues with manoeuvring in the tight spaces and we offer to give them a hand when they arrive.  Our friend Lisa has also come to stay for the weekend so the cats will get spoilt too.

Friday is a normal working day for Maria and, after job hunting an opportunity for me to get the boat cleaned up, we like her to look her best :).  This takes several hours but by the end of it Mariadz is looking beautiful for all of ten minutes! This is an issue at Burnham.  The marina is very nice, we have met some great people there and the carnival weekend is always excellent but there is an issue with birds – not Essex girls but Hitchcock level birds.  They look lovely as they fly around and at one stage we saw thirty starlings on the spreaders and standing rigging of one boat which made it look like a Christmas tree.  However, these birds seem to eat a lot of red and black berries…..so shortly after I have finished the deck, it looks like Prince’s mythical Purple Rain has happened.  I have cleaned the windows and I am not doing that again, so we will put up with it until the end of the weekend when I clean Mariadz down after our journey.

Bruce returns to tell us that a 50ft ketch, Sweet Surrender, will be with us in the next thirty minutes.  I set about moving Mariadz using the lines and the wind to push her forward.  It won’t be that easy to get her back, we will need the engine, but I am able to move her forward without disturbing the girls, or the cats!  Sweet Surrender arrives and John, the skipper, has her perform a flawless pirouette before putting her gently on the end of the long pontoon next to us.  I am there to take lines if needed but she comes to lie so gently against the pontoon that we have all day to get her tied off.  Maria can then start the engine of Mariadz and we can put her back to her old position with stern coming out as far as the boats on the long pontoon and the bow slightly overhanging the next entrance.  We have a nice chat and later a few drinks with the crew of Sweet Surrender before coming back to Mariadz for a gorgeous home made fish pie, prepared by Maria but with top quality ingredients sourced (or sauced) by Adam.  It’s going to be a long weekend so an early night is called for but not before Maria asks whether I can get the satellite dish setup so she can record some programmes over the weekend.  Now in a domestic setup, a clever engineer, works out where to point the dish when the system is setup and you never need to think about it. On a boat or motorhome, every time you move you need to reposition the dish, and in a boat you need to make sure you are tied well or the dish will move and lose the signal.  On one of our trips to a motorhome show, Maria had decided to get rid of the old standard dish and replaced it with a QuickSAT QS65 Portable Satellite System which doesn’t have an arm that can be broken. It also comes with everything you need to align the satellite…well, a mat, a rudimentary compass and a clever device to get the angle right – who needs a spirit level when you have that! At our home base in Ipswich, I know pretty much where to point the dish and generally get it set up well but I have not had such luck on our travels.  Burnham is quite easy to work out as the river goes east-west and we are on the north bank, so I put down the mat and roughly align the dish while I go to get the compass etc.  Before I get back I have a signal on the sky box! Excellent, now Maria can record X-factor…. 😉

Saturday is the major day of the Burnham weekend.  It starts with the Tucker Brown cup, followed by the meal and great music from Street Life and the end of the day is the carnival itself with a funfair on the walk back to the marina.  A busy day! We were asked if we fancied joining the race down the river but on this occasion we decline, I’m not sure if there is a handicap for having extra crew and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t really up for it.  There also isn’t much wind and definitely not enough to get Mariadz moving well. Apparently running the engine, even in stealth mode with our dry exhaust would be frowned upon :).  However, we are in a good position to take photos as they go past the Marina although the sun is a little bit of an issue, we are not going to complain.

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We also get a chance to support a lovely Hallberg Rassy 352, with its crew of four including two cats.  Unfortunately, the cats aren’t able to make the difference and they don’t win it this year!  With the race finished the lunchtime entertainment is due to begin and the Moody Owners have reserved some tables so we can all sit together.  These are near the food and bar and furthest away from the band.  We have seen Street Life a number of times and booked them for the evening entertainment for our wedding.  They are great with a mixture of old and new music.  If you haven’t seen them, I often describe them as like the band from The Commitments film but without the obnoxious lead singer character, we love them to bits and always have a good time when they are playing.  It also helps that Cliff is a keen sailor with his boat “Lusty Wench” (What a great name 🙂 ).  The food is great, the drinks are flowing and we are spending time with old friends and new.  I even finally got Maria up to dance towards the end.  As the place clears there is an invite to a Moody Owners get together on a Jeanneau NC11 motorboat, not a Moody and not a yacht but we won’t hold that against them. It actually looks really nice and the thirty odd people seem to fit on it, although she does look like she is on the plane with all the weight in the stern.  A couple more drinks and some nibbles before we head back to Mariadz to prepare for the evening’s entertainment.  Most of this preparation seems to be inviting people on board and more drinking and chatting. Oh well 🙂

To be fair we missed most of the carnival, unusual for us, and then met up with other friends in one of the pubs before getting home late and rather drunk.  Everyone seemed to have a good time and a very enjoyable taxi ride home – one to ask us about when you see us!

On Sunday we are due to return home.  One of the reasons that the event this year was a little less well attended than usual was the weather prediction for Sunday and the rest of the week.  Strong winds being expected from the South although this should work to our advantage and push us home nicely.  It also combines perfectly with the tides with a not too early departure.  That was a stroke of luck! However, in the morning we are not quick to rise and it is 10am before we have seen Lisa off and have the boat ready.  Just before we go there is a little excitement as one of the ocean rowing teams, not our Chinese friends, is brought in by the RNLI. There is a little concern at how bad it is out there but Mariadz can take it so hopefully we wont be needing the RNLI services later.

There is a 20knot southerly wind pushing us onto the pontoon and Maria is a little concerned that this may push us onto the bowsprit of Sweet Surrender but we have agreed to spring off from the bow which take us away at 30 degrees from the pontoon.  All the fenders are in place and we have a little help from our new friends. This was a little fortunate as I hadn’t moved the bow spring far enough back onto the pontoon but we were able to pause the manoeuvre, move the line and start again.  We come off fine so although not exactly text book, everything is good.  Maria then takes Mariadz astern and with a hard starboard turn we are through the exit and into the river.  This gives me the opportunity to stow the fenders on the mast pulpits (granny bars) again.  Unfortunately our departure coincides with a yacht race down the Crouch so Maria slows down and we follow the race down river.  There is some minor concern as the racers approach their turn and we momentarily think that the course may return directly back down the river and straight at us but they pass on our port side presenting some good photo opportunities.

After this excitement, the river is very quiet today which is something we quite often find.  There have been any number of occasions when we have looked at each other and realised that we are the only “mugs” out here!  We always keep a watch out on channel 16 when on passage and at 11am we heard a new weather warning.  Having swapped to the correct channel we hear that there are gale force winds expected “soon” which is maritime speak for the next six to twelve hours.  This means it could be when we are out there.  This wouldn’t be the first time that we have experienced force 8/9 winds since we had this experience returning from Dunkirk (The return from Dunkirk (part 2 of 3) – pan pan).  This would be our first time in Mariadz as a Moody though.  So we will need to be careful.  Originally, the expectation with a good breeze behind us was that we would fly up the wallet (lucky we have that spoiler on the back now!).  The reality was that the wind was variable and gusty with one minute there being 10 knots of wind and the next 35 knots of wind.  We decided that we would be taking no risks and started off sailing with half the main, the staysail and a third of the yankee headsail out.  As we came out of the Crouch we saw the only other sailing boat that we would see all day coming back in under ominous black clouds.  At this stage, even with much reduced sail, we are flying along at 8.5knots with the wind on the beam.  Soon we will be turning towards the Wallet and over the Spitway, which this time has lots of water over it.  As we turn, I take advantage of the change in the wind angle to take in the headsail, the other two are easy to get in if we need to and those clouds could be accompanied by even more wind.  To be fair the reduced sail didn’t harm our speed much and we still bumbled along at a good seven knots for the whole journey but it gave us piece of mind.  First though the Wallet, which is affectionately called “vomit alley” was incredibly rolly, with waves going across our beam but at least the tide and wind were in the same direction.

It is much worse when they are against each other although Mariadz is big enough to plough through these rather than bouncing up and down like Captain Pugwash’s Black Pig.  However, it is a little rolly which with a couple of hangovers isn’t ideal.

We have travelled up the Wallet quite a few times and when you have a following wind, there can be a problem as you turn to port into Medusa to head toward Felixstowe.  The wind changes from being behind you, to be on your beam and what seemed like a gentle breeze can seem much worse and make the boat heel a lot.  We are always very careful before making this turn.  On this occasion there is enough south in the wind for it to remain astern of us and so we just needed to control the gybe as the wind passes from one side of the boat to the other.  We always use a gybe preventer whenever the wind is behind and this can also help us to control the main when we turn so the manoeuvre is quite smooth.  After completing the turn we seem to be sailing very nicely at exactly the same speed as the waves, it is smooth and not rolling at all while we still travel at seven knots. We still haven’t seen another boat since we left the Crouch!  It seems no time at all till we are at Landguard and into very familiar waters.  We decide to keep sailing up the Orwell because the wind should be perfect.  Actually, it is even more variable as we are intermittently shielded from the wind by trees and hills on the shore.  It is now late Sunday afternoon on the Orwell and the river is completely empty, there must have been real concerns over the weather because normally the river is busy at this time.  We head up but lose a bit of time because of the variability of the wind, we are not too bothered and by this time Maria has put the roast dinner in the oven so it will be ready when we arrive in Ipswich.

Despite there being twenty knots of wind Maria gets Mariadz into the lock perfectly even when we had to move her forwards because another boat is approaching (where did he come from !!).  It is then through the lock and into the wind for a bows-to mooring in our berth which goes seamlessly.

Thirty minutes after being tied up, dinner is on the table!

We’ve caught up with our friends and made some new ones, the sailing has been great and Mariadz has performed perfectly.  All round great weekend!

Before I start, I should say that Maria is a London girl rather than an Essex girl! That said our three daughters and our feline daughter were all born in Essex but this also doesn’t refer to them 🙂

The last summer bank holiday of the year saw a very still and warm forecast and with Maria having worked very hard particularly in the last month we agreed we would get out and have a relaxing time. Earlier in August, we had anchored in Osea Island and, apart from the pretty good late night music and water skiers in the morning, it was very tranquil and we probably didn’t spend as long there as we would have liked.

So it was decided that we would head down to Osea on Friday, Maria could work while I drive :). The prediction for the whole weekend was for winds in single digits and Mariadz needs mid-teens to really get going so we expected that we would be motor-sailing most of the way. We also intended to get out quite early, at low tide in Ipswich, which would mean we would have the tide with us for the whole journey.  That plan was stopped when I had to go and sort a few things out for the boat and Maria had calls so it wasn’t until lunchtime that we left (several hours later than we had hoped). We motored down the river with the wind on the bow and as we pass Wolverstone we are hailed from the shore, are we going too fast? Is there a problem with the boat that we haven’t seen? Neither, just some friends who recognised us but as I said to Maria, I have gorgeous bikini-clad women shouting and waving at me all the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. We also get buzzed by the red arrows as they fly over the Orwell, just another day on the river…. We have now decided to leave the sails until we are out to sea since the last turn toward Felixstowe and through the Medusa channel is due South and would be dead into the wind, and we’re not tacking up the river today when we are later than we should be already! We pass the two large containers unloading on the newest docks at Felixstowe, each over 1,000 feet long and we are gently motoring towards the wallet and the gunfleet windfarm. The southerly wind is in our faces but we know the turn to south west into the Wallet will give us the opportunity to get some sail up and motorsail at the very least. So a couple of hours into our journey and we are ready to get some sail up and with little wind, it’s gonna be all the sail -main, yankee and stay sail! Even against the tide we are making reasonable progress down the Wallet, which is incredibly busy giving an opportunity to get the camera out and take action pics of the boats.

The Clacton air show was on the Thursday and Friday of this week so we will be catching the latter part of this as we drift past Clacton.

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Several boats are returning to port having spent the day at the air show but now we are approaching an awful lot of moored yachts and motorboats at Clacton. From a distance this almost looks like a pop-up Marina but as you get closer you can see there are quite big gaps between the boats. We have friends anchored off and other friends watching from the beach so hopefully they all saw us as well as the planes! We are on the look out for other friends amongst the anchored boats but I think they must be a sniper in camouflage since they were able to get a shot of us but I couldn’t see them. I later find that there had been more bikini-clad women waving to me, sorry to at I missed it this time. 🙂 We keep going at a reasonable pace with the intention of getting to Osea at about 7:30pm, a little late if there is a problem anchoring or the anchorage is full but we have been here a few times and never had a problem before. As you negotiate the gap at Colne bank, you can see the Bradwell Nuclear Power Station in front of you and it is another couple of hours down the blackwater, against the tide, to get to Osea. The river is quite quiet this evening and we make good progress, still motor sailing but with the wind having shifted slightly to South Easterly giving us some assistance from the sails as we progress down the river.  We go past Radio Caroline, which I didn’t realise was still broadcasting, one time we will have to try and get it on the radio when we go past! We arrive at Osea at the time we expected and start setting the anchor, I have remembered to attach the anchor float so that we know where the anchor is, the snubber is attached and holds the chain below the waterline which helps with keeping the anchor and boat comfortable and protects our top sides from the chain.  Finally, the anchor ball goes up and the anchor light is on so we are ready to settle down for a quiet evening as Bradwell gentle glows in the distance behind us 😉. Having lived in Tollesbury, on the other side of the river, for six years, I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about the Bradwell glow! We are up on deck quite late enjoying the tranquility so no music for us or Maria belting out tunes! She must be tired.  Maria’s actually in bed by ten but that probably isn’t a bad thing and means that she will be rested for the weekend.

The next morning, Clyde comes to wake us at about 8am being a demanding cuddle cat.  That’s fine though since we don’t want to waste the day away. The morning is magnificent, sunny and still, at least until the water skiers turn up mid morning! We decide that before everywhere gets too busy we will move to a better spot.  The place we chose last night meant at low tide we were within seven metres of one of the buoys, Maria doesn’t like that so we move further down the river where it is a little shallower but with more room.  The move is uneventful and we are settled back down with the float out, snubber on and anchor watch application keeping an eye on us.

We’re planning our day and a rib trip down the blackwater sounds a good option, leave three hours before high tide and come back about the same afterwards and we should be fine….or we will be waiting until the early hours for the tide to come back in.

Getting the rib set up is easy and we have the garmin navigation and the hand held VHF so we are safe enough. It takes about 30 minutes to get round to the Heybridge lock and then another ten minutes round to Maldon. Before we go we take a few pictures of Mariadz looking regal in the river. And we’re off. It’s actually quite a nice trip on a rising tide although the garmin keeps telling me this would be shallow normally, but with the tide we are fine. However, we are being very careful, as always, and stay to the channel in the centre. This is quite ridiculous as we find when we get to Maldon. Our rib, Connie, probably needs about 30cm of water, compared to the 180cm of Mariadz. As we arrive in Maldon, we see a lot of the Thames Barges that we see in the Orwell! Maybe I didn’t need to worry about the depth…. having lived in Tollesbury for so long and spent a couple of years driving through Maldon to get to work – I didn’t know anything about the riverside area at all and it looks really nice. My first experience is to go to the two pubs on the waterfront, having left the rib on the small visitors pontoon. This works well as we arrive to an empty pontoon, but soon after the world and his wife have decided to come to Maldon, so I had to keep going back to make sure that little Connie didn’t get crushed by anybody and to move her so that others could squeeze in. We all work together and by moving things around we get everyone into the pontoon.  This includes some new friends on a small yacht who made contact with land a couple of metres short of the pontoon! We waited a few minutes for the tide to lift them from the mud and then could bring them into the pontoon rather than being stuck out there 🙂 later we saw them sailing back up the blackwater “refreshed”.

Having had a bite to eat and a couple of liquid refreshments, it’s time to get back to the boat and cats. We head back on the rib and see some really pretty beach huts on sticks (sorry no pics) just north of heybridge.  We then decide it is time for our first circumnavigation …of Osea island – pah that wasn’t difficult! Maria is feeling proud having got that under her belt. We’re back in time for sunset, a lovely BBQ and some time with the cats who have missed us. Sunset is amazing with the sky turning a deep red, I promise there is no filter on the photograph. Then as we are finishing dinner, a couple of guys from an adjacent boat are pottering around in their inflatable and come to say hi, I suspect that we will be chatting more tomorrow…. especially as we can hear them laughing and joking on their boat anchored nearby!

Sunday is a very still day again, morning Clyde, is it attention time already? Anyway with a sunny day forecast and nowhere near enough wind to get Mariadz going, it will be a relaxing day listening to music, sunbathing and chilling – just what Maria needs. But first, the boat looks untidy and needs a clean. Another advantage of the liveaboard life is that when your home needs tidying up, you can do it when your anchored rather than cutting the weekend short to return to your house to do your chores. Anyway, 30 minutes later and we are all clean and tidy.  Now the real work of sunbathing and relaxing can begin. Oh and maybe a cheeky glass of wine. Our new friends in the anchorage pop up river for a sail, there isn’t any wind though 😉, and on their return we invite them onto Mariadz to properly introduce ourselves before hitting the beach later for a barbecue. For one of the crew, it is her first time on water, and she is not comfortable doing the ride to Mariadz in their inflatable.  I offer to pop over in the rib to collect her and come back nice and slowly so as not to worry her.  I throw the line back to Mariadz but the combination of my poor throw and a missed catch means that the rope is in the water. Instinctively, I reverse back so that I can retrieve the line, why did I do that! The line gets nicely wrapped around the prop of the rib and the engine stops.  After switching off the ignition, I lift the engine and unwrap the line as we drift slowly down the river. Lowering the engine and restarting works fine and we can try and do a better job of it this time!  We get my passenger safely on board and we can add another unique experience to our boating life. To be fair it was quite quick to resolve the issue and if it hadn’t have been, I would have been able to deploy the anchor quite quickly too while I solved it (or ended up rowing back to Mariadz…. with one oar…. against a stong tide). Let’s just be grateful that no damage was done!

The drinks are flowing and Maria is making up her innocent-tasting, wicked cocktails – these four are about to be Mariadz-ed! After several hours of drinking, we need to go to the beach if we are going to eat more than nibbles.  The anchorage is now getting busy too but we have been here a night already so hopefully the other boats will anchor in a way that doesn’t cause us any problems. Not that is an issue for us, we like to have access to the decks and so we deploy our fenders which has the added benefit of giving the cats a way to get back on board if they did fall in.  It must look strange and unnerving though when you anchor close to a boat that has their fender deployed, not much confidence in anchoring ability being demonstrated there!

Anyway, everyone gets their stuff together for the beach party and we ride into shore in three dinghies to set up camp, having been joined by another couple from a small motor cruiser from Maldon. We are now on a falling tide with low tide scheduled to be about 11pm but we are not worried about such things…..yet.  Maria goes off “hunting for wood” but it must be hiding because she comes back with only a small twigs.  It is ok though as we all go off and forage for wood for the fire and soon with some liquid help it is roaring, a little like us! Maria’s brought some music and a speaker, although thankfully not the full karaoke setup, so music is playing and it is a lovely evening.  We are eating quite late but everyone is having a good time.

After sunset and dinner, four of our party decide to head back to their boat but the rest of us are continuing chatting. However, some time later, there are some shouts from the yachts anchored closest to shore.  These are not ABOUT us but apparently someone is stuck in the mud so we are needed to go to their assistance.  We discover that one of the girls decided to get out of the tender as they were returning to their boat.  Apparently the swim to shore was fine but then, because of the low tide, she was wading through exceptionally grippy mud. We rush over and find her up to her waist in mud and unable to move.  One of things I noticed here was that there seems to be two consistencies of mud here which I guess depends on how long it is exposed to air.  The mud towards the top of the bank is quite hard and easy to walk on.  But as low tide approaches and you get closer to the water, the mud becomes like quicksand.  It took a few minutes to extricate her, and ourselves, from this thick mud and then we got her to the fire to keep warm.  Maria and I go down to the rib to see how far away it is from the water and it is still 30 metres.  We start to lift, push and pull 150kg of rib and engine down the beach but we then get to the thick mud.  Having seen what this can do already tonight, we agree to leave the boat here and wait for the tide to come in. As we return to the camp fire, having deployed the anchor just in case, we have to explain the decision to the mud-encrusted girl who is now very keen to get back to her boat. In the fullness of time, the tide comes in and floats Connie and we can all start to get in with all of our stuff from the beach. We are covered in mud. We drop off a mud-caked young lady at her boat and return back to Mariadz.  We have to do some cleaning straight away on the bathing platform with the really useful shower, hurrah something that worked and I haven’t had to fix! The main clean up will be tomorrow, so all of the mud caked clothes are left in the cockpit and we go to have a proper shower on board.

The next morning I am awake early despite it being a late night.  There are quite a few boats that have left already. It is a beautiful morning and I get the opportunity to survey the scene of devastation on Mariadz. Well alright there is some mud, empty drinks etc.  I notice that we have a few bags from our new friends and also some things missing which I assume they have, so when I see life on their yacht I get back into the rib to return their stuff.  They seem to have the last things that we are missing and I return to Mariadz as Maria gets up to tell me there is another bag! So it’s back in the rib and delivering more stuff. All this is done and over the next hour or so, Maria and I tidy up the boat for our return to Ipswich and lift Connie back up using the davits and secure her.  The tides are not really in our favour and there is barely any wind, and certainly not enough to drive Mariadz without some help from the engine but it is a glorious day and will be a pleasant trip home.  We send our farewells by text and start our journey home.

The trip up the Blackwater is as calm and still as you would expect.  Although I do have sail up eventually, we do have to switch the engine on as we drift along at a couple of knots. We can’t spend a whole day on the return. Lots of people are trying to take advantage of the glorious day but are similarly challenged to go at any speed but everyone is showing willing.

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I get to take quite a few pictures of the other boat up the Wallet and the Orwell. The highlight of which was seeing a porpoise and her young swimming in the Wallet, although I will admit it isn’t the best picture in the world!  Maria became an excited school girl when she saw it!  Really sweet as she spontaneously bursts into tears.

As we pass Felixstowe Maria pops the roast into the oven so that it will be ready soon after our arrival.  We arrive in time for freeflow at the lock and so it is quickly through and tied up, Maria doing this a little quicker than she would normally, apparently because she needed to see to the potatoes 🙂

Its been a wonderful few days and really felt like a holiday in the Med or the Caribbean.  Maria has had a good break and we have made some new friends..

Oh and what’s an Essex girl’s favourite wine?

“I wanna go t’ Clacton!”.

🙂

We have spent the last two weekends away, firstly in Lymington, attending a seminar about blue water cruising and then to Italy to pay taxes, speak to builders and check out the house.  We therefore decided that we would have a weekend away somewhere quiet and decided that a few nights in the River Stour would allow us both to relax and chill.  It would also work out because we were expecting to see my son, Matt, over the weekend and it would be easy to pick him up from Harwich.  Maria still had to work on Friday but we decided to leave on Thursday since our setup allows her to work from home wherever we are.

It’s a beautiful evening as we head down the River Orwell and start to discuss where to stop.  We can either pick up a mooring buoy at Levington or anchor either at the bottom of the River Orwell or the top of the River Stour. We decide to keep going to the anchorage opposite Harwich Parkeston Quay at the top of the Stour adjacent to Shotley.  The trip down is mostly uneventful except Maria starts to think the engine doesn’t sound “right”. I go below and notice on the electrical panel that we are charging the batteries intermittently. This is changing the tone of the engine which is what Maria heard. I start to investigate and everything seems to be ok as we continued but I recognise that we will have a job to do when we return understanding why the charging is not consistent. As we pass Shotley we notice our good friends the Thompson family from Ipswich, coming back up river. They have taken on an amazing project and are living aboard while they renovate their boat before going off travelling. It is an ambitious project but they are committed and we are really pleased to think of them as friends.

We anchor in a familiar spot and have a quiet evening. The traditional arrival drink, a beer, is ready and this time in our new hand painted glasses!  We also got some good news about a potential new role for me so all is right in our world as we settle down to a dinner of steak.

The next day starts well from a weather perspective and I am checking over the boat as Maria works.

I even break out the hammock that we have had for eighteen months and think about how to rig it.  Maria has always been worried about the pressure on the headsail of rigging it to there, which we have seen a number of times previously. I had noticed that Simon Thompson had rigged a spinnaker line to take the vertical pressure from this setup and thought by using two spinnaker lines and a cleat I could rig this so that both the horizontal and vertical pull was held by two different lines, sounds perfect in principle.  The other end could be held on a masthead cleat and I have been able to set up the hammock in a way acceptable to her majesty, siting on her throne at the chart table.

Between work calls, I am able to distract Maria enough to get her to try out my new setup (having checked it first, can you imagine the trouble I would be in if it failed!). Maria agrees to give it a go. I have video evidence. I also seem to have a court order which bans me from sharing said video evidence.

Anyone who has read about our rib will know one of the main issues we were trying to address was to allow Maria to get in and out with some decorum since she seemed to spend most of her time in an inflatable lying on her tummy with her bum in the air! She also struggled to get out of the Lotus Elise when we had it, with a common outcome being a loud thump and Maria picking herself up off her hands and knees….in front of a packed pub garden. Cool. So with much noise Maria gets into the hammock and we are all good…the camera is still rolling….she starts to get out.  Let’s just say that the first thing to hit the floor was her left hand, and she tried to get out on the right hand side. The final shot of the video that you are not allowed to see is Maria reversing back to the camera as she stands up….. close up and fade to black! I don’t think the court papers specifically excluded a description of the events. If they did my next blog will be from a police cell.

It gets towards the end of the day and Maria is finishing work. The anchorage is nice but is opposite a commercial port with ferries coming in and out infrequently. if we head down the river, it is very quiet under the Royal Hospital School. It’s been a glorious day but some clouds are to the west of us where we are heading. Maria points out that they look pretty evil but I check the wind direction which is gently blowing towards these clouds and point out that unless they are going against the prevailing wind direction, we’ll be fine….. Maria is not one to say I told you so but within ten minutes the rain is lashing down, the wind has turned and it is blowing over 30 knots.  Not the best weather to go on the foredeck and put out the anchor. We decide to float around while the thunderstorm passes, Maria also points out that where we were is still bathed in sunshine and it wasn’t her idea to move!  She points this out quite vociforously. With limited visibility, I take over the boat and decide to check out exactly where we will be anchoring when the weather improves. Quite a few people ask us about how the cats are on the boat, particularly when we are doing longer journeys or the weather isn’t good.  Bonnie and Clyde have grown up around boats and are very relaxed, on passages they will generally be in the cockpit with Maria and I or asleep downstairs.  You can see how stessed they were at the height of the storm.  It isn’t long before the thunder stops, well after three storms roll through, and the weather starts to improve and Maria takes over so that i can set up our anchor gear.
We have to reset the anchor because we weren’t quite where we wanted to be and at low tide it gets a bit shallow in the bay under the hospital school.  Finally we are set up, anchor float attached to the anchor with a line that can be used to retrieve the anchor. Ten metre snubber line to ease the strain on the boat and anchor, and several other snubbers making sure that even if we have a problem the windlass is never exposed to the yank of the chain.  Anchor ball up and we are ready for our evening. When the rain was lashing down earlier, we had taken a look at our BBQ food and thought we may be in trouble here! With the change in weather we decided to have a Thai dinner rather than cooking in the rain and wind.

We settle down down for a quiet evening, Mariadz style… it was probably around 11pm when Maria decided she wanted to listen to music. Oh dear! The Louisa Johnson song where she laments that it was only ten how did it get to three, could have been written for Maria…..obviously three is just the start and if Louisa wanted accuracy she would probably have gone for five or six! This night is no exception and despite a couple of attempts to get her to go to bed, it is “just one more song” until 5am when Maria makes egg and bacon sandwiches before going to bed as most of our (sensible) friends are starting to wake up. Later that day, we are “hanging”. It’s a lovely day, but a bit breezy. However, my hangover is not shifting and I go back to bed for a little while. While I am asleep, Maria chats to Amanda Furber, and agrees that we should all get together – I just need to pick them up from Harwich (4 miles away) in the rib like I am a taxi! I’m still not in a great state but I am sure the river ride will sort that out! While deploying the rib, there is a momentary stutter from the Davits as the motor stops and just clicks.  But it comes back, so another one to put on the list of things that need to be checked.  Just before leaving, Maria asks me how we are doing for fuel.  On the rib, we have the main tank that feeds the engine and a reserve five litre can which is always full.  The wind is blowing down the river towards Harwich and there is quite a swell.  This doesn’t bode well for the return journey but getting there should be fine. We have only done a few miles so I’m sure the fuel is fine…..of course I get a mile downriver and the engine cuts out as the main tank is empty! so it’s lift the seats get the two cans out and transfer fuel from the reserve to the main tank, all while being rolled around, beam onto the waves. Refuel complete, I can restart the engine and get to Halfpenny pier to pick up my fare. Amanda and Mark are waiting on the pier when I arrive.  I throw the rubbish into the bins and am ready to go. But Mark has a cunning plan, he will drive the car to Wrabness, slightly up river from us and I can get him there, it will be a shorter journey. Amanda joins me in the rib and we start to head off back to Mariadz.  I may have mentioned that it was blowing 15-20 knots and the waves are quite deep, probably a metre from the tip to the bottom. We are making progress but it is not particularly comfortable.  On the way to collect Amanda, I had remained dry for the entire journey, that wasn’t the case on the return.  Amanda acted as a good water and wind break but I still got wet.  Her back was also aching from the constant banging up and down and together we arrived at Mariadz wet and tired. Reading that last sentence back I should probably reiterate that this was a journey in the rib and nothing rude! I drop off Amanda and call Mark to find out where he is.  He is on the far side of Wrabness with the beach houses and the mooring buoys. He has waded out to knee height as I approach and climbs in and we have a comfortable ride back to the boat with the wind and waves at our backs.  On return to Mariadz, we go to the stern and decide to lift the rib back onto the Davits to avoid the rib banging the back of the boat overnight.  We are clipped on but the stutter we had previously seems to be here to stay and the davits wont work.  The rib is up enough for overnight and we decide to check it out in the morning.

I can now do the barbecue we have been promising ourselves and we all settle down to a lovely evening in the cockpit chatting, eating and drinking.  Mark is quite tired and bails responsibly early, i.e. before midnight, but Amanda has the bit in her teeth…. and a few drinks in her tummy. It is 3am (again) when we eventually all decide it is time for bed – someone will be feeling a little worse for wear tomorrow.  The next morning we are up reasonably early since we need to get Mark and Amanda back to Wrabness.  At this stage, Mark and I are beginning to think that since I added the 5 or 6 litres of fuel into the tank we have travelled six miles to and from Harwich and a couple of miles return to Wrabness which is now being repeated.  It should be fine…. and I will fill up both tanks when I return to Ipswich.  We get enough from the davits to drop the rib again but they are still playing up.  It is a bit calmer for the journey back to Wrabness and I am able to drop them off quite close to the beach at high tide and they wade back in.

Now for the return journey to Ipswich.  We are still getting nothing from the davits which appears to be an electrical problem, potentially something shorting out.  I have checked in the control box and everything seems fine in there, no loose connections and voltage where I would expect it but I am no expert.  Maria and I decide that we will have to tow the rib back and work it out over the next few days.  We hardly ever tow a rib so we have a large mooring line to do the tow and two back up lines…a bit belt and braces, especially when the mooring line also has a shock absorber built in!

I go to lift the anchor, having previously checked that the davits electrical problem wasn’t impacting the windlass.  This is reasonably uneventful and the anchor comes up surrounded by approximately a two foot ball of mud and weed!  It is a sight.  I call Maria to come and take a look with Mariadz on autopilot and tracking down the middle of the Stour.  As we return from the bow, Maria notices more white smoke than is usual coming from our exhaust.  We check the temperature of the engine and it is above the normal working temperature.  We reduce revs as I go down below to check out what is going on in the engine room. I am greeted by quite a warm engine room. At the best of times the engine room is a “no shirt zone” and this was hotter than usual.  The water strainer on the aft bulkhead is completely green inside and it seems obvious that this is blocking water getting through to the engine.  I explain the situation to Maria and we decide to get some sail up quickly and switch the engine off while I try and fix it.  The clear lids on water strainers on Marine engines are great things, they allow you to see exactly what is going on.  However, they do have a tendency to stick fast, especially if there has been any heat.  Needless to say I can’t budge it.

I phone every chandlery along the Orwell to see if they have the specific devise designed to remove these covers but none have it.  Our friends on facebook, where Maria had updated, are trying to make suggestions: hot water over the top of the cover to make it easier to shift, wd40 under the lid to try and budge it and a wet cloth to get a better grip.  Nothing is working.  Since there is no water in there, perhaps a vacuum has formed so loosen the feeder pipes and let the vacuum out before trying all of the above again.  still nothing working.  On Cliff Elgar’s advice, I try to wrap a line around the lid with a view to pulling and twisting the lid off.  Again I am unsuccessful.  By this time, Mark and Amanda have called us to offer some assistance and some tools!  We agree that Maria and I will go along to Levington, pick up a mooring ball and meet them there.  After 45 minutes of eventful sailing, a regatta of 50 odd boats was coming the other way and not really thinking about how we were going to pass between them, we arrive at Levington.  Maria approaches the buoy perfectly with me midships as her spotter calling down the distance and angle of approach. In fact she sits Mariadz there so perfectly I could have had a cup of tea while I threaded the line and took it back to the bow to tie off.  Once settled, I get in the rib and head to the marina to meet Amanda and Mark.  They have stopped at Halfords and bought various tools that should give us a grip.  They also have their dog, Milly with them, and most importantly a new 5 litre can of petrol for the rib!  The four of us head back to Mariadz so that we can start to fix the problems.

Unfortunately the water strainer is being stubborn, none of the tools that Mark had brought were shifting it and we decided to review the rope technique again. With one minor adjustment, suggested by Mark, we had a better grip and the top started to move. In the end we had a loop in the end and the other end passed through this, this was then placed around the edge of the lid with the loop on the left hand side.  The pull would then tighten and then move the knot anti-clockwise.  With both of us pulling we start to budge the lid.  We can now see the jumble of weed that is in the strainer, we clear this out, put everything back together and are happy that we have fixed the problem.  Engine start and check the flow of water……negligible. oh dear, engine off. We should probably check the impeller.  On the yanmar engine, in common with a lot of marine installations, the impeller is in a very awkward place where I have to unscrew panels to access the impeller and even then I am going under the engine and reaching up to the vertical plate.  Our new lighting in the engine room is great but doesn’t get to this area which is still quite dark and you cant actually see it anyway because of its location.  So you are groping around in the dark and you have to feel your way (as Olivia Newton John would say).  It’s four bolts so release those, catch them so they don’t fall in the bilge (virtually inaccessible if they fall), as the last one goes, remember to catch the plate (similar bilge access issue!).  I have the plate off and a firm grip of all the parts so we can see the impeller, it looks fine and moves as it should.  Lets put it back together then.  Plate in place, don’t drop anything, hand tighten four bolts and then tighten with the spanner, 1, 2, 3, snap! Now that’s unfair, one of the bolts has sheered but at least the other three are on tight which should stop any leaks. Another job for when we are back in our berth.

So we have established that the engine is trying to draw water in, and the problem has to be at the other end where the water comes into the boat.  We decide we need to check the through hull.  Take off the two jubilee clips and lift the pipe off the through hull….nope.  That aint moving either! We have applied heat from Maria’s super hairdryer but still no progress.  Eventually and with a rolling hitch we have successfully attached my trusty, water-strainer-lid-remover rope to the pipe and it does it’s magic!  With the pulling of two of us we are able to get the pipe off the through hull.  Now lets see if we have any water coming through the through hull or whether the problem is in the pipe.  Open the through hull, just for a second, we don’t want to sink… a dribble of water comes out.  We could leave this open for weeks before we would need to worry about the boat sinking.  So there is a blockage on the though hull outside of the boat.  So two techniques, firstly, wire hanger to clear any hard objects and the large brush under the boat from the rib to scrape away any weed.  We test the engine and we have flow and a six inch piece of weed goes straight into the strainer!  At least we know what happened.  Having removed this, the lid comes off without the threat of “the rope”, and put everything back together again we’re ready to go.

I drop Amanda, Mark and Milly back at the marina so that they can go for a walk and return to Mariadz for the last part of our epic journey home.  We start up and everything is looking good, but within 200 metres the temperature is starting to rise and again we need to slow the engine down.  By staying between 1,000 and 1,500 revs we can keep the temperature under control, less than 100, and we limp back to Ipswich slowly.  This gives Maria time to cook a roast dinner for when we arrive – an advantage of having a great cook for a wife!

Coming into the lock is interesting, Maria has the boat well placed but, after she has stopped, I have to move the rib out of the way before I can bring the stern in.  Everything is tied off, including the rib.  Coming into the berth, one of our neighbours, Peter, offers to help and I throw him a bow line and ask him to tie it to the end of the pontoon so that we can use it as a spring to keep the boat under control while I tie her off.  We’re in and safe and Maria has the engine off before I have finished tying us off, she has confidence in her man!

We can now inspect the damage over the next few days and fix everything….but first time for a lovely roast dinner.

We had such a good time at Easter that we have been keen to get the boat back out again.  This bank holiday weekend coincided with the sad anniversary of the death of Maria’s Dad and so we decided we wanted to be close to Harwich where her step-Mum lives.

Early in the week, the weather prediction was for a light northerly, turning southerly on Friday.  We decided at that stage that Halfpenny pier or anchoring in the Stour would be our getaway this weekend.  We would hopefully be able to persuade Jean, Maria’s step-Mum, to come on the boat and possibly even go for a gentle sail down the Stour – it would be her first time on the boat and I believe her first time sailing. So our plan is to leave on Friday, go to Halfpenny Pier for the night, pick up Jean on Saturday morning and take her down the Rover Stour, anchor for lunch, little bit of fishing and a relaxing sail to back to Harwich. If it is too busy, we will anchor close and the next day, I will take her in on the rib bback to Harwich before heading back to Ipswich during Sunday.  This will be in time for Kristy, our daughter, to see us Sunday night and Matthew, our son, to come round on Monday. A sort of busy, relaxing family weekend if you know what I mean.

Whenever we go to the Stour, Maria wants to go fishing, and I don’t mean the dating app for any youngsters reading!  This normally means that I end up spending between £10-£20 on bait, we either don’t fish or don’t catch anything and end up feeding the crabs with the rest of the bait at the end of the weekend.  However, my cunning ploy for Easter weekend was to buy frozen bait! Maria didn’t fish at all that weekend but that means that I don’t need to buy more bait this weekend in a place she traditionally likes to fish.

During the week, we had Lindsay from Seapower over to review the engine after her weekend workout and also to discuss the next stage of our engine refurbishment – replacing the fresh water and raw water hoses which are original and have clearly had some heat through them (at least once by us when the fresh water system was inadvertently drained when the hot water boiler was changed).  This will be in a later blog post. Needless to say our Yanmar got a clean bill of health and we are confident that she is in good shape now (touch some wood) and will be even better when we have finished our fettling of her!

So, it’s Friday night and I return from an afternoon meeting for some frantic running around prior to getting through the lock and down to halfpenny pier. We are closing on low water which should mean the tide is reasonably slack when we arrive. We have a lovely sail down the Orwell as the sun reaches the horizon. In fact Bonnie is taking her “watch” very seriously keeping a look out for traffic and dangers. However, we are late and sunset, in our wake, is a full half hour before we arrive.

When I’d called earlier in the day, the pier was clear and I had been told that we should moor on the west end of the pier.  Now we arrive there is a 40 foot boat on the pier where we should be with two other smallish boats taking up the rest of the space. I am able to call out to the boat and explain the situation.  They tell me that they have also been told to moor here but I suspect that this is a bluff. We explain that will be fine and we will raft our 54 foot against their 40 foot boat! Alternatively they can raft up next to us, much more sensible.  They decide to come off the pier to raft up to us but eventually decide to occupy the ferry berth.  Since we are a little bit later than expected, we decide to approach the pier into the incoming tide, but with strong winds blowing us off the pier it is a tricky approach, especially in the dark. There is also a small yacht on the other half of the pier so we only have a smallish gap to aim at. Maria is taking her time, and the people from the other yacht come over to help us. They ask us to throw them a line and I am loath to until Maria has manoeuvred Mariadz nearer the pier but eventually throw a mid line with instructions to tie it to the bollard at the end of the pier so Maria can use it as a spring.  It gets tied off half way down the pier on a railing and too close to the other yacht to be of use, if Maria powered forward and relied on it to get her into the pier, she would hit the other yacht.  One of the other yachties asks me to throw a bow line which I do.  In retrospect I should have asked for that to be tied further down the pier so that we could use that as a spring but instead the yachtie gives an almighty pull on the bow and nearly makes us hit the pier.  Maria hears my call for the bow thruster and pulls the bow away from the pier.  Eventually, and it does take some time, Mariadz gets manhandled closer to the pier and I can get onto the pier and sort out how I think we get her in properly. I am able to bring a second mid line with me and I get this on and Maria can then use this to bring the stern in.  We are now on the pier and safe, with some tidying up to be done of the lines.  This is all done quite quickly and we are comfortable. It is late though, at nearly 9:30pm we are late. Too late to cook. We have been meaning to go back to the Thai on the Quai, which is excellent, but unfortunately they are refurbishing until mid-May 2017, so we decide on a Chinese, but that is a twenty minute walk away and for some reason, despite their website saying an 11pm close, they will not be able to fit us in unless we arrive in ten minutes.  So fish and chips it is then, since we are going to the Alma on Saturday.

The next morning, I am up reasonably early and I get to spend a little time chatting to Mike, one of the harbour masters and also the person that I had spoken to the previous day about berthing on the pier.  We mention what happened the night before but the other yacht has got away early and didn’t bother to pay, hmmmm the problem with the honesty system I discussed during our Easter trip. Mike remembers us from previous visits and reminds us to make sure the boat is locked with the keys away, not because of any crime issue in Harwich, just because he likes Mariadz and would be tempted to take her out :). Mike’s also part of the RNLI at Harwich which is one of the charities we always give to, hopefully not for selfish reasons! We hope we never need their help but what they do, and the bravery they show, is amazing. I mention to Mike our plans for the weekend with Jean and he says he will put out the “no mooring” signs so that our berth is protected if we go out.  The wind is blowing a southerly at 15-20 knots, perfect for a little sail down the Stour and back, but it will be Jean’s first time on the boat and we don’t want to run before we can walk.

At lunchtime on Saturday, Jean arrives and begins to get acquainted with the boat, we’re having a pleasant time and so we decide to raincheck the day sail and do it another time. At this stage we are the only people on the pier. Toward the back end of the day Queen Galadrial, a Thames barge, takes her place on the outside of the pier.  Apparently she is normally at the west end but today she takes up the space between us and the ferry berth. As she is coming right at you with the battering ram that is her bowsprit, you hope that they stop before they hit you.  Needless to say there is nothing to worry about and she finishes a metre off of Mariadz’s bow.

We always have a lovely time in Harwich, it is a wonderful old town with lots of back streets and pubs :), similar to Queenborough, that we visited a few weeks ago, or Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. The local fisherman also come in with lobster and crab.  We are strangely conflicted here because the lobster will be amazing but when you are sailing you have to be very careful of the, sometimes poorly marked, lobster pots. So one minute you are celebrating the fishermen and at other times you are cursing them. On the whole though, the lobster is too good to miss out on, and the fishermen are always very good with their boat handling, so respect and gratitude is due. Today in Harwich, we had another “water-user” too. A group of jet-skis came in from the sea entrance. In common with a lot of things, there were two types of person in this group. The responsible, considerate person wearing a helmet and the idiot with the fountain of spray from their exhaust, that didn’t seem to notice or care, where their spray or wake went. One thing we have learnt is that this second type of inconsiderate person are always around, unfortunately. They go without causing too much noise or trouble but it is unusual to see the two types of person in one group, in an often criticised form of water sport. Other yachts, and passers by, come and go and we also have the regular ferry journeys to Felixstowe and Shotley. It is always interesting to catch up with these people and to understand their stories as well as discuss our hopes and plans. Around about lunchtime on Sunday, Jean has to go home, but we all agree it has been a nice time and a good first meeting with Mariadz.  Jean has promised to return and we will take her sailing and also get her behind the wheel.

I had spoken to Mike earlier in the day, and it looked like the weather was going to get worse, no rain, but the wind was increasing. Maria and I decide we will leave early afternoon and sail up the river with the gusty south easterly behind us. However the winds are gusting well over thirty knots and so we decide that we will only have a third of the main and the headsail out, this means a little slower progress but also means that a strong gust will not overpower us. As we enter the River Orwell, we make the turn past Felixstowe towards Levington and the wind is nicely on our beam. Even with little sail, and no engine, we are bounding along at eight knots with just a little help from the river. As we go up river, the wind angle does present some challenges though. One of the things we have been taught, and learnt well, is to rig a gybe protector. This is required if the wind is behind you, because a relatively small shift of the wind can catch the other side of the mainsail, smashing the boom across the boat. This is dangerous for people – do not get your head in the way of a flying boom – and also for the boat, because of the power being thrown around and the potential impact on the rig. So we tie a line from the back of the boom tightly to the forward mid-cleat on that side which is enough to stop the boom crashing across if the wind shifts. Of course coming up a river with hills, trees etc, there are lots of wind channels that can throw the direction of the wind so we always rig this as a precaution.  We are having a lovely, and safe, sail up the river, in fact we are working quite hard, as we tack the headsail around from time to time, sometimes goosewinged, with the two sails on opposite sides of the boat, and sometimes sailing with both sails on the same side. Progress, since that first tack with the wind on the beam, is slower and we take a couple of hours to get up the river. Obviously not so slow that another cruising yacht overtakes us….Maria wouldn’t stand for that but still slower than we are accustomed.  As we approach the lock there is no let up in the gusts, which means that Mariadz is being pushed away from the pontoon in the lock, but Maria has it all under control.

During our time sailing we have listened to many people for hints and tips.  When seeing Queen Galadrial, the other day, I had seen a line from the bow being put on the pontoon cleats first (a bow spring), which then allows the helm to steer away from the pontoon, bringing the stern in while the bow is held close to the pontoon. This gives lots of time to get the other lines on irrespective of what the wind is doing.  I have seen this done before by many people and it avoids the problem of “losing” the bow, or stern, without the need for a bow thruster. This is a development on the technique we were taught early on of getting a mid-cleat line to shore first because it will limit the movement of the boat and act as a pivot point. It would also have helped us out with the mooring at Harwich earlier in this trip. I decide that I can test this technique without jeopardising our normal mooring technique.

We enter the lock, Maria has Mariadz positioned beautifully as we approach.  Unfortunately the line I chose for the test had a shock absorber, which is heavy rubber. This stops me being able to get the line on a cleat, so I quickly abandon the experiment and we moor as usual without any stress.

Today, because we have had a winter of using the generator, we have to fill up with fuel which means going onto the fuel pontoon which will have the gusting wind directly behind it. A second opportunity for a test :). As we come out of the lock, Maria is going slow so I can swap the lines and fenders to the other side.  I decide to experiment again but change the line to one that does not have a heavy rubber weight. As we approach the fuel pontoon, there is a large (50-60 foot) motor boat at the end which limits our space to approximately 60 feet, and we need that much just to fit on without hanging off the end. Again Maria is in control as we bring her in and the approach is nice and slow. I am able to step off the boat onto the pontoon and put the bow spring on. Unfortunately it is too long and would not stop us before we hit the motor boat but I have quickly put on the mid line, as usual and we are soon in and tied off, waiting for fuel. While we are waiting for fuel I review the length of our bow spring and adjust the length for our third and final attempt of the day. With an additional 470 litres of fuel on board (2/3rds of a tank), we pull off the fuel pontoon with help from Tim, who fuelled us, and Maria gets Mariadz away from the pontoon and ready for the approach to our home berth.

It is true that Maria may have “mentioned” two failed attempts to “try something new” and had raised whether it was sensible to be trying this on a gusty day with the wind blowing us away from our pontoon and onto our very nice neighbours boat.  People who know Maria will probably have an idea of how this was “mentioned”. That said, Linda and Peter next door, had set their fenders and had told us not to worry about laying alongside them while we sort ourselves out.  However, we don’t want to be in that position if we can help it and I know that the bow spring will help….if I can get it right. Maria approaches our berth and is perfectly positioned. One of our other friendly neighbours, Mark (we are lucky on B pontoon at Ipswich haven) comes to offer a hand. I give him the bow line while I step off with the spring and mid line. As Mariadz starts to get caught by the wind, I have the spring line on, and as previously discussed call for Maria to go forward and turn away from the pontoon. Magically, the boat moves closer to the pontoon and stops going forward as the stern comes in. The mid line is now on and I go to the stern to get the line to finish tying her off. We are in perfectly and haven’t touched our neighbours, despite strong 20+ knots of cross wind. We also have another new technique for bringing Mariadz in that we know works – I mark the line to make sure we know where it needs to go to get the manoeuvre right in future ;).

It is the end of the sailing for this weekend, and now for some family time 🙂

Most years our season starts sometime in March but again this year the weather hasn’t been great and also we have had some things we needed to do so our season hasn’t started until the Easter weekend. That is more than six months since we last went out and we have had some work done on the engine since then.

As part of our preparation for going, Lindsay from Seapower spoke to us and wanted to come on board to do a full engine and generator test before we start the season. We all knew it was probably unnecessary but we agreed it was for the best. For a couple of hours we ran the engine in gear to test that there were no leaks, excessive smoke or problems with the drive train. The Yanmar performed fine, with little smoke considering she hadn’t been run for quite a while. Then onto the Onan generator which started easily and purred like Clyde eating prawns! This was all done late afternoon on the Wednesday and it gave us the opportunity to get down the river and moor against Halfpenny Pier in Harwich for the night. This starts the break early and knocks 90 minutes off the journey by the time you have negotiated the lock and transited the River Orwell. After stocking up on essential supplies, our first time through the lock for ages is uneventful, although we are clearly a little rusty and the tying up on the pontoon in the lock isn’t quite as unhurried and calm as usual as we get slightly blown on and Maria has to make a couple of adjustments to get us away from the pontoon and then back on it. After a long time in the lock (there is a lot of water to move), we are on our way.

The wind is shifting from NW to West and so we motor down the Orwell at the speed limit of 6 knots. From an instrument perspective we have no log – I didn’t clean it before we left and some crustaceans have obviously blocked up the wheel. We also have no wind instruments for some reason, I suspect that there is a problem at the top of the mast and the windex was not replaced when we did everything else. Our wind guide is our ensign, it gives us direction and depending on how full of wind it is we can guess the wind strength. We have had to do this on a “sailing holidays” boat before so we are not worried about it at all, Mariadz will tell us if she isn’t happy with the wind. There is nothing on the river at this time, a couple of hours before sunset, and it is very peaceful.

I had spoken to Nick, one of the harbourmasters at Harwich and he said that we can use the ferry berth if the pier is full because we are away early in the morning. We also have to post our overnight fee through his door – you have to love the trust and honesty system on the East coast of the UK. We pass Felixstowe and start heading to Harwich to find the outside of Halfpenny Pier completely empty. Maria approaches into the tide and wind and gently ferry glides Mariadz onto the pier and I tie her off. The wind is actually a fair bit stronger than we expected, blowing around 15-20 knots, so actually it is not as if we really need to tie her off, she is pinned against the pier anyway. Still tied off and with all fenders on the pier side, we are ready to get changed for dinner.

Maria has booked us into the Alma in Harwich for dinner and we have enough time to make ourselves presentable and head into town. The Alma has a really nice atmosphere and the food is excellent, especially their steaks and lobster. At the next table we meet a couple who are moored on the inside of Halfpenny Pier. Now a lot of people will take their dog into a pub or beer garden but these two had their three cats in the pub with them. All five of them were staying on a twenty footer which he’d described as his yacht when they met. I don’t think it was quite what she was expecting when she first went aboard but they seemed very happy and we had a lovely chat. The cats may also have got a few treats from the kitchen too 🙂 I’m not sure it is anything we can do with Bonnie and Clyde but the cats were really well behaved, happy and loved. At the end of another gorgeous meal, we returned to the boat and settled down for the night ready for our early start the next day and the trip down to North Kent.

At 7:30am, a little later than planned, we pull away from Halfpenny Pier and set out to the North Sea for the crossing of the Thames Estuary. Our routing is to head south through the Medusa channel, avoiding Cork Sands and the shallow Stone Banks, before crossing above Gunfleet sands, with its huge windfarm, to head down the Kings Channel to Barrow Deep which gives you a pretty direct south west line to the River Medway. The wind is blowing westerly at about 15 knots and the sky is clear, so pretty much perfect conditions for a southerly and south westerly crossing. The crew are mostly awake and ready to go although Bonnie and Clyde seem to be settling down to sleep in the cockpit and Maria is thinking about setting up for her work day on the move with a number of calls and conferences.

The Medusa channel is quite often covered with lobster pots, with very poorly marked balls or floats on the surface so you have to be vigilant as you progress through the channel to Gunfleet. We also had a quite scary experience a few years ago when we saw two strange “lobster pot” markers on either side of the channel and as we got closer we saw partially submerged floats on a fishing net strewn across the channel. An emergency ninety degree port turn put us parallel to the net and about three metres off it. Disaster averted, we were able to return to our course as we negotiated the end point of the net. Thankfully we recognised what this was in time, the question has to be asked though, why would you put a net across the main channel for south bound travel at the perfect state of tide for a southbound journey? It has made us vigilant in the Medusa channel though! On this day, progress is pretty average, despite keeping the engine running, but the tide is due to go in our favour down the Kings Channel and a couple of hours later we have made our turn south west and with a slight increase in the wind too we are soon bounding along at 8.5 to 9.5 knots under full main, full staysail and approximately 50% of our yankee headsail with the engine off. Even accounting for 1-2 knots of tide helping us along, we are still making good progress and it is a comfortable sail as Maria works in the cockpit. For the next four hours we are making good progress and cover 30 miles to put us squarely in the mouth of the Thames and pointing at the mouth of the Medway. We have been reasonably relaxed about our plans and the weather isn’t perfect over the coming days with some quite strong overnight winds forecast for the back end of the weekend. We decide we will anchor out for the first couple of days and then spend a day or two in a marina. We have had Chatham recommended to us a few times with its historic yard and museum and I call in to see if and when they can fit us in. Unfortunately there is no room at the Inn :(. We decide that we will anchor out as agreed and then work out what we are doing after that. As we proceed South West, we go past a large fort, the Knock John Maunsell Army Fort which looks like a bouncer guarding the Thames and is similar to Sealand, the principality in the North Sea that we often end up sailing around if we go across the channel. These were anti-aircraft platforms during the war apparently but look imposing structures on guard permanently and should be painted black for the full doorman effect. Fortunately it looks like our name is on the list so we can keep going. After this you see the Maunsell Navy Forts which look like Martian tripods from War of the Worlds but from our angle it looks like one has been ostracised – not quite sure what it said but it looks very sorry for itself. It still takes another hour and a half for us to get into the River Medway and as we enter the river we see several yellow buoys and some masts protruding through the water. This is the SS Montgomery, a munitions ship that sank in 1944 and still has 1,400 tonnes of explosives on board. We’ll tip-toe past that then! We are now looking for the creeks since we have decided to anchor in one of the creeks in the Kent marshes. We go into Stangate Creek so that we can find Sharfleet Creek which gets quite shallow at low water with a six metre tidal range at this time and we are pretty much at high tide so it looks very inviting. We have decided to anchor in one of the “holes” which is charted at 4 metres and so should have something like 8 or 9 metres of water at the time we are there. We’re intending to stay for some time so I deploy our heavy rocna anchor in the middle of the hole with forty metres of chain. The thought was that this would give us four times the maximum depth when the wind was likely to be blowing 15-20 knots. The other side though is that when we are around low tide with four metres of water, there is a lot of chain. This has the effect of making us “wander” around a bit on the anchor, although the anchor isn’t moving. We use an app to help us when anchoring, Anchor on the iPad, which shows you a track of how you are moving around your anchor. It is important to remember to switch the app off before you move off though, or the anchor alarm starts going and you are frantically trying to work out what is going on.

Maria has been able to work a full day whilst we travelled and as it gets to the end of the day, we settle down, make our dinner, chill, chat and watch the seals bathing on the muddy banks as the water level falls.

When we arrive everything seems so flat but as the water level lowers, it seems that you are in a muddy canyon and you start to see rocky outcrops appearing from the water, top tip not to go near those when the water rises! A few other boats have come in and start fishing and a larger ketch has also come in as the tide is falling, and anchors in a deeper hole further into the creek.

It is not a late night and we are in bed reasonably early. With the anchor alarm app we use, you set a distance for triggering the alarm. When in the Stour we have generally set this at about 25 metres but of course with a wider tidal range and more chain out, this isn’t nearly enough and so the alarm goes off a few times during the night but when I check our position manually, I can see we are in a good place (and exactly where we should be).

We are not up early and during the morning we discuss our plans. We explore the idea of going to one of the other marinas in the area for when the wind picks up but we are not convinced that there are many other options for a 54 foot boat with davits (another six foot) that draws six feet (1.8 metres). We look towards the Isle of Sheppey and Queenborough Harbour and decide to “go take a look” on our rib, Connie (t/t Mariadz). We have our life jackets on and the waterproof grab bag with a torch, VHF etc and with the hand held nav system, which also fixes to the dash of the rib, we are ready to go. The trip over is not as easy as you’d think, there is a reasonably strong wind at our backs and I am trying to get the rib onto the plane, so that the trip is level and comfortable, without going too fast to make it uncomfortable. With Maria’s recent back injury, from which she is still recovering, the last thing in the world I want to do is to put her back under any pressure. Of course every time I get up on the plane, Connie picks up speed but if I try to reduce the speed she comes off the plane and starts to wallow in the swell. So I am constantly adjusting the throttle trying to keep her on the plane but not going too fast that she crashes over the waves. I also have one eye on the return journey which will be into the wind and waves, I am guessing somebody, most likely me, is going to be getting quite wet! We arrive at Queenborough and tie up Connie on the waiting pontoon while we go and have a chat with the harbour masters, Chris and Dianne who are really friendly. We explain that we are looking to come in the next day and potentially stay for a couple of days and there are a number of options: we can hang off a larger buoy, tie up to the pontoon on the other side of the river and be water-taxied in or we can stay on the harbour masters pontoon and walk ashore whenever we want. We agree that walking ashore sounds best and we are not worried if people raft up to us as long as they are considerate. Before heading off, we decide to have a quick (liquid) lunch stop and see what the town itself is like. Chris and Dianne offer to look after some of our stuff while we walk into town and we gratefully accept. “did you know there is an alarm going off in that room?”, yep that will be our anchor alarm telling us that we have drifted three and a half miles to Queenborough – must remember to disable the app when we go out on the rib! Our first impression is that Queenborough is similar to Harwich, with lots of small backstreets with older cottages, it seems very pleasant. Our first stop is the Old House at Home, which is an old fashioned pub with quite a few people in. Maria checks us in on Facebook and is told that she has checked us into the wrong one. Who knew there would be two pubs called the Old House at Home on the same island! There is a “bullsh1t corner” with a guy sitting there who we listen to intently…. The pub also has live music later in the weekend and so this looks like it could be a good place to go. We decide to wander a little further into town and see what other places are available and find the Flying Dutchman, with a name like that you have to try it… This is a lot larger and more modern with an extensive menu and a parrot (not on the menu!). A quick drink and then we really need to head back to Mariadz. It is now mid-afternoon and we agree that Maria will “drive” us home. That means that I will sit somewhere around the middle and try to help balance the boat. I am also conscious that although the grab bag is waterproof, the wet proof cover on our camera bag is not likely to help much if we are getting soaked. We had out of the River Swale to go back to our creek. Maria sets the throttle and we are going a lot faster than the journey in but certainly not maximum speed. Connie is riding the waves really nicely and we are back in the creek in no time and bone dry! I’m sure Maria will say this was due to her ability behind the wheel! It’s another great sunset in a really peaceful place but with the wind expected to pick up over the next few days we decide that we will pick up anchor first thing tomorrow and head to Queenborough.

A slightly less quiet evening, with Maria doing her “I just want to hear one song” routine, unfortunately she doesn’t seem to tell me which one song she wants and eventually I play about forty before she has had enough. We also did a whole lot of chatting and singing, a capella of Simon and Garfunkel’s, The Boxer! I’m sure a little alcohol must have been involved somewhere! Dinner is duck with Chinese pancakes (enough for four people) followed by home made Thai green curry, also enough for many people. Needless to say we enjoy the pancakes and barely touch the curry, which is lovely, and now joins other meals in the freezer waiting for us to be too lazy to cook properly.

Morning comes and we prepare to leave. I have switched off our anchor light and removed our anchor ball and then set to the anchor itself. As part of our setup we have a ten metre line with a hook that we use as an anchor snubber. This allows us to link the rope to the chain and attach the rope to our bow cleats. It reduces stress on the windlass from the pull of the boat against the anchor and softens this pull. As a backup we also have a deck mounted anchor snubber which comes into its own if there is a problem with our primary. In addition to this we have a trip line and anchor buoy. This has two advantages, firstly it is possible to retrieve the anchor if there is a problem with the chain (like it breaks!) and second it is a good way of knowing where the anchor is which can help with understanding whether the anchor is moving, or dragging. We saw this setup on a Swiss boat in Ramsgate once and decided that this was a good idea for us. It means the whole deploying and retrieving the anchor is extended but we felt the advantages outweighed this disadvantage, although all of this was about to be reviewed. We are at low tide and we know that at places this area is quite shallow at this time. However, we are keen to get away. There is also a North Westerly wind which is quite strong and blowing us towards the shallow centre and southern section. The snubber comes off quite easily and the anchor is on its way up. As the anchor comes up, it comes up to deck height, the wrong way round and so it needs to turn. I lower the anchor again and then allow the twist to free itself. Meanwhile Maria has the boat under power. The anchor turns and comes back up with a quick flick throwing Medway mud all over me and the foredeck. I set about retrieving the anchor float and am getting the ten metres of line in quite well. Unfortunately as Maria is moving forward the float drifts backwards. Maria decides to use the bow thruster for a course correction and despite having nearly all of the line in, the float won’t budge. I call to her to use the bow thruster the other way so that we can free it. She does and the float comes free with some minor damage. However, the combination of the bow thruster and the wind is moving us to starboard and towards the south of the creek….where the shallows are. Maria calls that we are getting low on depth and we quickly agree to turn hard to port, that was when we lost all motion and now we are stuck. I am quickly back in the cockpit and we discuss our options. This is potentially serious despite that we are five minutes prior to low tide (a good decision) and there will be more water lifting us momentarily. At the same time, the wind is blowing us into the shallows so we could just find ourselves being shifted further and further onto the mud as the water rises. Maria is trying to turn hard to port and using the bowthruster while I am starting to contemplate getting the rib deployed and using our anchor to kedge us off. In what seems like an age but was really just a few minutes, Maria starts to get some movement to port and we are unstuck. We now just need to make sure we don’t go slamming into the other bank, but at least that will be easier to get off 🙂 On reflection, we decide that Mariadz didn’t really run aground on the mud but was dredging a channel for smaller yachts!

We are clearly both a little shaken by our mistake but we are safe and starting to move out of the shallow creek and into the deeper creek. Apart from a minor depth alarm warning which isn’t a problem we are fine and heading into the river to head to Queenborough. Maria has to keep one eye on the chart because this part of the river looks really inviting but has some shallow areas so we do our usual and navigate by the buoys to make sure that we are always in a good place with plenty of water.

When we were at Queenborough the day before the pontoon was pretty much empty and with quite a strong tide coming in, we decide we will go past the pontoon before turning and mooring into the tide. Then we see the pontoon and they are rafted four deep next to the part of the pontoon we are meant to be approaching! But it is ok, the large motor boat at the end is coming off and so that should make it easier. Except the motor boat is going back onto the pontoon exactly where we are expected to be. We speak to Chris on the radio who tells us to raft up to the motor boat and Maria starts her approach. We are into a reasonably strong tide and with a strong wind blowing us onto the pontoon but Maria has done this kind of thing at Halfpenny Pier many times before and with a burst of bow thruster, Maria straightens up Mariadz and she nestles nicely against the motorboat where we can tie her off. At this stage, we are told that the motor boat will be leaving at 1pm and then we can move alongside the pontoon.

There is no point leaving the boat and so we contemplate our options. There is a strong tide coming in and with several yachts in a raft behind us, we agree there is no option to come out astern. Not least of all that once we are moving a little we will lose all ability to steer once we are going the same speed as the river water. Can we come off forwards? there isn’t much space and the concern here is that the motorboat has said that they intend to exit that way and so we would be getting in their way with a lot of boats on buoys just past the end of the pontoon. We continue to talk. In the end the option we go for is to turn the wheel as if we are going to starboard. Now this has the effect of moving the stern to port or away from the pontoon. You can then use the bow thruster to counteract the bow going in to the boat/pontoon and effectively come off sideways. This needs to be done with enough revs on the engine for Mariadz not to move in relation to the pontoon despite the incoming water wanting to move her astern and into the happy group of yachts behind us. We test our theory while tied up to check what happens to the stern when you turn full lock and despite a strong wind blowing us in, it looks like it will work. We explain what we are going to do and the motor boat skipper says he is intending to get out very quickly and so we will be able to stay there for a short while before we can get onto the pontoon. We start to untie the boat as Maria readies the helm. We start the manoeuvre and it is going well as we start to come off sideways. Unfortunately Maria has to come off the bow thruster for a second so she can make an adjustment and as she goes to put it back on it inadvertently flicks the other way. There is a safety cut off to stop you constantly changing the direction of the bow thruster and Maria has now been caught out by this as the wind grabs the bow and elegantly knocks it into the motor boat, fortunately not causing any damage to the motorboat. The cut off releases and Maria can get the bow thruster back on and as the bow eases away the motor boat goes out through the gap. We can then approach the pontoon in our usual way and tie off. Quickly another boat approaches and rafts up next to us but we are tied up with extra lines to shore and the rafted boat is well tied to our mid cleats and stern cleat. when we surveyed the bow we saw that we had made contact with the motorboats rubber rubbing strake (bumper) which left a black mark on our hull but there was no other damage – nothing that a little CIF couldn’t get off 🙂

We are now safe and secure and can relax since we will be here for a couple of days. The cats are relaxed as always and decide to have a little explore of the area, I’m sure Clyde is looking for mice or a pigeon to supplement his diet!

Maria and I decide to go into town in the afternoon to do some shopping and have an explore. The co-op is quite a walk and after getting the shopping we decide to break up the return journey with a refreshment break. We found people very friendly in each place we went in during our stay in Queenborough and despite having said we would be back at the boat by 5pm we were a little late. In fact, the reason for the curfew was that we were expecting one of our friends, Deanne that Maria used to work with, to join us overnight. We had decided to cook up a little Mexican menu with tortillas to start, followed by a chilli con carne with all the trimmings washed down with a cheeky Prosecco or two.

We have explained to Deanne where we are and she gets most of the way before calling in to get the last few details of exactly how to get to us. I describe the pub we went in the other day and explain that if she proceeds along the waterfront there is a car park right in front of the pontoon. After a couple of minutes my directions have apparently put her onto a footpath with bollards at the end! I go to find her…with additional instructions from Maria for some more shopping for the meal – I had forgotten a few things. I arrive at the footpath to find Deanne’s car very close to the road to the car park. Unfortunately, she has to reverse out and go around a park to get access to the road to the car park, sorry! We haven’t seen Deanne for some time and it was nice to catch up and the weather was kind so we spent most of the time in the cockpit area protected from the elements by the cockpit tent. It’s a lovely evening but in common with other times when Maria hasn’t seen a friend for a while, she will not go to bed. As the song has it, “it was only 10, how did it get to 3” and this is my life 🙂 Eventually, the girls stop chatting for long enough to realise it is probably time for bed, especially as Deanne has to collect her daughter early in the morning.

The next morning is a slow start. The cats are broken as they always are after a late night. Deanne surfaces and is over an hour late, oops! Maria cannot lift her head from the pillow. I see Deanne off and settle in the cockpit chilling and catching up. Periodically, I pop down to check on her ladyship, who is clearly broken. She isn’t able to get out of bed until 2pm and then it is tomato juice for quite a while! Maria is a traditional girl though and no Sunday would be complete without a roast dinner and this time it is roast beef. Despite her hangover, Maria excels and dinner is fantastic. We also have a couple of pleasant conversations with some of the locals including being described as “proper sailors” because of the amount of mud on our anchor! That’s one in the eye for those who criticise us for having too big a boat with too many creature comforts.

This will be our last night at Queenborough, although we will definitely return in the future. The weather is starting to get worse and some strong winds are predicted for mid-week and despite not very favourable winds, we know we need to go on Monday or we could be stuck in Kent for a number of days. Unfortunately, the tides which were so favourable for us on the way down, will work against us on the return unless we leave in the early hours or in the afternoon and arrive in darkness. Neither of those options is too appetising and so we decide that despite the unfavourable tide we will leave shortly after dawn and recognise that it will be slow. It is also not helped by a 20-30 Knot wind which has shifted round to North East, exactly the direction we will be spending most of our time going!

As part of my clearing up, I have to break down the fishing rods, which haven’t been used again despite £20 of bait being bought.  Unfortunately one of them has jammed and after trying several methods, with help from the local fisherman, we are eventually able to free the two halves by using Maria’s posh hairdryer 🙂 After they are broken up, I am having a quick chat to Chris the Harbourmaster who mentions that the other week they were catching large Sea Bass just fifty metres away from where we are standing…..and Maria hasn’t even tried this weekend…..oops 🙂  (Just as discretion is the better part of valour, I have found that cowardice is the better part of discretion and so haven’t told Maria about this.  And now she has proof read this post I can add it in 🙂 May be best not to mention it if you see Maria.)

We leave early the next morning with Maria performing a flawless departure with an audience of zero! (isn’t that always the way). The wind isn’t great and is right on the nose and as the tide turns progress is slow. The distance we covered in four hours at the start, now took us over six hours to negotiate. Maria is quite “tired”, hmmm, not going to sleep ’til late will have that effect. She spends a fair amount of her time sleeping while I am on watch. She does allow me to get some rest while she is on watch though. I say she is on watch, I think Clyde probably does as much as she does 🙂 Bonnie doesn’t like to be on the outside and when I lay down to close my eyes for a while she becomes very demanding wanting to be cuddled while I sleep. In the end I have to cuddle her, while she headbutts me and I try to rest.

The trip up Barrow Deep and the Kings Channel is monotonous and slow. We are only making three knots progress at the height of the tide against us with the wind blowing on the nose at nearly 30 knots. Mariadz can handle it and she doesn’t mind a little water over the bow, nothing will get near the cockpit anyway and we are dry, warm and comfortable despite the weather. Maybe that is why some people don’t like our sailing, we aren’t in full wet weather gear, getting lashed by the spray and wind for hours on end! We’ll just accept that we are fans of cruising rather than racing 🙂 We make the turn to the north to head into the Medusa channel and I am finally in a position to get some sail up. The tide has slightly changed and suddenly we are flying like usual with a perfect line all the way into Felixstowe harbour. We continue sailing a fair way up the Orwell river before deciding to take the sail in and motor the final leg home. The weather is clearing now and there are some lovely views as you go up the Orwell. As we proceed up the river we are  know that we are now in the last stages before we can tie up. It has felt like a long trip back. As you approach the Orwell Bridge, you need to call up to the lock so that you can get into the locked marina. Maria calls in and we are lucky to be just catching the gates before they are closed. Maria approaches warily because of the quite strong cross wind but handles the boat almost perfectly as this time she did make me jump a few feet rather than the more usual step down to the pontoon.

We come into our home berth bow first, again being blown away from the pontoon which means that I have a slight gap to negotiate as I step off and tie off our lines. There is no fuss and we tie her off.

Its been a great break and despite a little rustiness and a few mistakes we have had a rest and feel refreshed. We will learn from the mistakes but nothing was damaged and I had already cleaned off the dirty mark on the bow before we left Queenborough Harbour. As always, Mariadz behaved impeccably and looked after us despite the weather and our mistakes. Within 30 minutes of stopping, she was back to being a home, waiting for her next adventure.