We plan to catch the early ebb down the Solent and back to Lymington. This won’t start until around 1.30, so another leisurely morning after a late breakfast. The doctor on the boat moored next to us chats to someone on another boat further down. It turns out that his boat caught a gust while they were leaving a mooring in Portsmouth and he had tried to hold on and got a finger trapped. Her description was “…it was just hanging by some skin, so they flew him to a plastic surgeon in Salisbury.” This tale is OK but not especially welcome as we are already experiencing gusts of around F6. We think carefully about the process of leaving a lee pontoon without leaving a finger behind.

In the event Heydays behaves beautifully with a stern spring and we motor away feeling a bit smug. The wind in the Solent is a steady F5 from the East and the sun is shining as we turn the motor off and run back for home with just a genoa. Highly stressful…

So…although we were later than planned to be on the water, the work we have done over the winter means that the old girl is back to something approaching respectability with systems working and a few improvements made. Not the most adventurous of cruises this time, but a great preparation for some trips further afield over the summer.

We had planned to take the tender up the river to Newport (capital of the Isle of Wight), but as this is really a shakedown cruise, this was not one of the bits of kit that we had previously tested. In the end we discovered a leak around one of the valves and that brought an end to the plan as the special glue for the rubber boats takes around 48 hours to cure properly.

It turns out to be an ill wind as they say, as we take the water taxi to the shore and walk the 2.5 miles or so along the river bank into town. Newport by the river turns out to be OK and once again is a funny mixture of both new and slightly derelict or perhaps just faded…

A ‘lite bite’ turns into fish finger baguettes for 3 of us and smoked bacon and stilton baguette for the remainder…not exactly ‘lite’. But the pub by the river was lovely and served glasses of Jubillee Fizz (English sparkling) and pints of ‘Cheers Ma’am’. All very patriotic…

We heave our pints and lite bites back down the river bank, past the preparatioins for the Isle of Wight Festival, and past the old paddle steamer “Ryde” which someone unkindly suggested was a little project for James…”just needs a bit of welding and the odd lick of paint”…

So… a quiet day stretching legs rather than sailing, but pleasant all the same.

Some of the people on board are determined to celebrate the Queen’s 70 years on the throne and Heydays ends up being decorated for the occasion…

After a leisurely morning we plan to catch the ebb down Southampton Water and head where the wind best suits. Presumably in celebration, the marina staff appear with a trolley full of free drinks and we relieve them of a few glasses of prosecco and a beer…not too much as we are heading out on the water.

A couple of us want to pay some different respects and we turn briefly upstream under the Itchen bridge to what is surely the most glamourous of places of dreams…or nightmares!

Actually this part of the Itchen brings back some memories of our friends Graham and Madeline who completely rebuilt their boat My Foolish Heart in a small yard just opposite the Saints stadium. Some of the yards seem to have an odd way of coping with flying boats…

The wind is very different from the forecast and as we turn to head out it is a good F5 gusting 6 from the SE. With two reefs in the main and a couple of rolls in the genoa, experience has shown that Heydays will tack really well and take what the weather has to offer in her stride. The sailing is glorious…

Given the wind direction (which had originally been forecast as having some west in it), we opt to head back to the Folly for another night on the Medina instead of Chichester as planned. Tacking down Southampton Water and we dodge the various ferries, tankers and other assorted boats. We’re not racing…but we manage to outperform several others. Ha!

Although we are on a falling tide, with just 1.4m draught, we can pinch a little more out of each tack than some of our deeper cousins. With hot tea and coffee on the go, it is really joyous to be out even if the reverie is broken by unreasonable helms shouting “ready about”, followed by a general hauling and winching before we can settle in for another 10 minutes or so.

By the time we reach the the Medina, the ebb is now running across the entrance at over 2kts and we join a throng of others motoring steadily up stream. Lots of boats are already tied up and the various clubs etc have bunting and flags…

We head further up and out of the mayhem to the relative calm of the Folly reach. This never fails us and we spend the evening just chilling, eating and watching life come and go…

Waking up to the sound of birds looking for breakfast on the mudflats is always one of the joys of the creeks and rivers, even if we are sharing it with a dozen other boats. It is easy to forget that this is still a commercial river in many ways until a remarkably long ship makes its way upstream.

The name is both explanatory and funny….there is a wind turbine factory in Newport.
True to form as we leave the river and just as we pass the Red Funnel ferry, it gives a loud blast to say that it is leaving…they really take no prisoners, but we are well clear and head off out into the Solent heading east past folk who work for a living!…

…in order to poke our nose into Wootton Creek to see what it is like. We have the main up, but there is almost no wind to even fill it and so we motor-sail along the north east coast of the island past the various remnants of what were presumably royal landing stages and boathouses attached to Osborne House. This was one of Victoria’s favourite retreats with Albert and also where she spent considerable time in relative isolation after he died.

The rocks off Wootton are not to be taken lightly and we keep a cautious distance off before heading into the creek.

There is not a huge amount of room for moorings or anchorage and the yacht club has a drying pontoon, but ferry aside it looks pleasant enough.

Just as we decide to head out again, our peace is disturbed by three black police ribs powering into the creek. They carry out a boarding exercise on the ferry…not initially successful as their ladder isn’t long enough. Presumably any villains on board would wait until the police got the right ladder.

Back out in the Solent, the wind has filled from the south west and we enjoy a single tack round the east side of the Bramble Bank and up Southampton Water where we plan to pick up Chris from the train. A few other yachts are out including a design/paint-job which provides a disturbing optical illusion…

We have company up the water with a small tan sailed gaffer and it is great just to be sailing free.

Southampton Water is another strange mix of the heavy industrial on the west side…

…and the old and more leisurely east side, including Netley Abbey and the old military hospital which saw thousands of wounded troops arriving by boat from France in the first world war.

We round up past the car and boat commercial handling dock….and meet Chris in Ocean Village. We are 50m from the Harbour Lights cinema and take in an ‘old’ Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. A rousing utterly American movie in terms of themes, dialogue, story line…and (sshh) lack of any sublety!!

Anchoring in Newtown Creek is always a delight. So little to disturb the peace except a few quarrelsome birds and the very occasional rumble of the anchor chain as she settles to subtle changes in the tide and wind. No tide to catch until much later in the morning, so a cup of coffee in bed sets us up nicely for the day.

The early sun sends dappled light across the cabin roof, but there is a chill to the wind even this late in May.  

As we heave up the anchor (OK…so we’ve got an electric windlass!) we seem to bring half a ton of best Newtown mud with it. Heydays breaks herself free and we push out into the Solent for a short hop round to Cowes for lunch…and then a squall comes through. Fortunately, we saw it coming and were already in our wet weather gear…ha! John and Yee Tak bravely face the weathery maelstrom!!

The showers continue like this for the rest of the day, but it is just wonderful to be out on the water again. Cowes is its usual busy self and the Red Funnel ferries give no quarter. Some unlucky (or incautious) souls get madly hooted at for their troubles and we feel like being back in school with a cross teacher. Once you know it is not you in trouble but one of your mates, you can sit back and enjoy the event!

We pass by the posh places and head for Shepherds  Marina for a short stop. Years ago it used to be free….it can’t be more than forty…but the very pleasant and friendly receptionist smiles very pleasantly and friendly as she takes £21 for 4 hours! Lucky we didn’t go posh.

Cowes is of course very nice and quaint and still has a decent range of very local shops with polished brass steps and old bells over the door. It must be expensive keeping all that brass polished as they wanted over £20 for a deck brush.

However, a couple of pints and a prosecco later and all is well again. Lunch by the river watching the activity is very therapeutic and we finally head off up the Medina to the Folly Inn. The river is a strange mix of faded Victoriana, modern steel and glass and old industrial. All interspersed with some lovely countryside.

We moor on the pontoon and discuss important stuff like when to go over to the pub for a drink, when to have dinner…or snooze as the tide gently recedes….

The water taxi picks us up at 6.30 and we have a lovely 15s trip to the bank. Only £12 for a return journey, however, the boatman has a lovely smile and it is a lovely (albeit short) ride….

The Folly Inn is itself a bit of an anachronism. Set miles from anywhere, it is something of a party place and it brings back memories of John’s stag do years ago when he was seen dancing on the table with a ‘few’ ladies….just sayin’.

Dinner back on board as the sun provides a colour display to end the day…

So, this is not the most adventurous of starts to the sailing season, but for us it is a milestone. Lockdown did the old girl no favours, but we are reasonably proud of her after some gutsy work over the winter. Just laying alongside the harbourmaster’s pontoon we feel that once again we are ready to take on what the sea has to offer…OK OK….the Solent then!

Even the simple act of trundling round the supermarket to get some stores in feels like we are off once more and evokes such happy memories. The ‘essential stores’ turn out to be a bit heavy on the booze side, but… plus ca change.
We fill up with diesel and with our new super-size water tanks we are ready to take on whatever the south coast can offer. Oddly we had wondered whether we were out of practice in general boat handling, but while not quite the well-oiled machine we once were, we feel that we are still not too shabby in that department.

With South Westerlies for the start of the week and Easterlies at the end, we wisely head east. Newtown creek is only an hour away and we keep the engine ticking over to get the tonic and white wine cool in the fridge. But it is glorious just to have the sails up and to hear the water chuckling under her keels once more. This is what she (and we?) were made for.

It is not the adventure into the unknown, but Newtown never fails to delight…and it is right on our doorstep…we are so very lucky. The entrance at low water is always interesting (and tight) and a long keeled German boat almost on its beam ends shows the pitfalls. We drop the hook into a couple of meters…she holds fast in the mud and within a quarter of an hour we are at the gin! Smug or what?
An evening just chatting, listening to the birds and the sounds of the mudflats…plus some oysters as a starter and a late rum…how lucky are we to be born into a stable, tolerant and prosperous part of the world. With a sunset and showers elsewhere, we head to bed humbled and grateful.

So, here we are. May 2022 and Heydays has just been launched after what turned out to be an extended period ashore. Our last post suggested that the old girl had suffered from a lack of proper use during the almost 2 years of stop-start lockdowns and reduced ability to get out. Once ashore and with everything out, the jobs seemed to mount.

The first issue was the interior woodwork…don’t read on unless you are endlessly fascinated by other people’s DIY and boaty exploits. The original joinery fitted by Moody’s is a laminated ply. The problem is that inevitably the laminate is thin and doesn’t take kindly to any real sanding to get old varnish off…it is all to easy to go right through to the bare ply. After a few successful and less successful sorties with the loo door we settled on a mix of scraping and mild heat. Too much heat lifts the glue on the laminate (don’t look at the back of our loo door!). Our best friend in all of this was a complete revelation…the mighty BAHCO scraper…brilliant. A remarkably simple but fantastically effective scraper. With a lot of patience we got through around 5 or 6 layers of varnish and then the next issue was what do we put back. We didn’t want to varnish as we wanted something which we could easily touch up or recoat. In the end we settled for Osmo Polyx Hard Wax Oil. This is used for laminate floors and is hard wearing, reasonably shiny in a satiny kind of way and hopefully easy to give a quick titivating coat to in a couple of years if needed. We are pleased with the results so far and will bore you all with updates after a season sailing. We were on a roll and decided to do the cabin floor as well and to reconfigure it to make easier access to the bilges to dry them out.

We knew that we needed to replumb the water tanks as we have suffered from ‘water anxiety’ ever since the old ones were cut out and replaced with plastic when a previous yard replaced our keel bolts. A close inspection and a look back through the original Moody specs showed that, far from our lack of water being simply a pipe issue…the new tanks were less than half the original capacity, even if the plumbing actually enabled access to it!!! We took the plunge and ordered purpose made tanks from Tek Tanks and were assured that they were the original spec. 10 weeks later we collected them. 10 weeks and 4 hours later…they don’t fit! We assume that, like most boats, tolerances in original build are quite big and we decide that with a bit of judicious sanding and cutting we can get them in. A little bit of sawing and then a largish chunk of plastic ‘comes off in me ‘and’. It turns out that this is the rim of the original tank….and was designed to be removed not hacked out. The yard who did the repairs to the keel botls (and who will be nameless) did a real bodge job. With all the old rim removed…surprise….the new tanks fit like a glove and are over 2x the capacity of what we had. Hot showers on board here we come.

Other stuff we have done….a self-tailing winch on the mast for the main halyard to help increasingly arthritic hands, a new aerial on the rear arch for future AIS and some repositioning of the GPS aerial (this turns out to require a new one after some overly enthusiastic treatment of the old one). All old incandescent lights replaced with LEDs and USB charge points in all cabins. We even have ‘new’ carpet on the fore and aft cabins although it turns out that carpet fitting is not a major skill on my (James) part! Oh…,and probably more importantly, we checked/tightened all the keel bolts.

It just leaves the engine battery to be rewired, but where is the bit of paper which showed where the 5 leads connected??? Enthusiastic tidying has evidently consigned it to a great dustbin somewhere. A happy hour spent tracing wires and checking voltages and we are back to what appears to be normality…and we haven’t set fire to her.

Sails bent on, superstructure and topsides rubbed back and polished, anti-foul applied and we hardly know the old girl. Still stuff to do (new cushion covers/upholstery, shot blast and re coat the hull) but hopefully ’22 will see us actually sailing and giving Heydays the continual TLC which old ladies need.

This is always a slightly anxious moment even though we know that the yard have done this a zillion times before…

They hold us in the water so we can check for leaks, of which there never are any…until this time! A small weep around another old redundant transducer and we are lifted out again and placed on the quay. Old one out, cleaned, resealed and tightened….lifted back in and hey presto, all’s good.

…and off we go. It’s always great to be back on the water, even under some threatening skies. We slip away from Keyhaven and inch down the chanel with just a cigarette paper between us and the mud at times (but we’re on a rising tide so all is well). With a gusting F6/7 on our tail, we reach Lymington in less than half an hour with just a scrap of genny flying…happy days.

Post script

Back on the mooring and we tidy up and pack the dinghy. The outboard has been run up and checked so all is …..*******. It doesn’t start! Investigation the next day proves to be the new E10 petrol causing problems. We clean carburettor, tank and all the fuel lines. New petrol (E5) added and all is well…until the next post?

We have decided to take Heydays out of the water for a few months to give her the TLC she missed last winter. The old girl is showing her age a bit, which is unsurprising given that she was built in 1989.

West Solent Boat Builders have a small yard at Keyhaven and not only do they charge less than the big ones in Lymington, but everyone there is very friendly and they even let you borrow the odd tool occasionally to help out.

An early start on Sunday as we wanted to make the short hop to Keyhaven at the top of the tide. Keyhaven is delightful and unspoilt…but shallow even for us at just around 1.4m draft. Being a bilge keeler we can take the mud, but would rather not sit in glorious isolation for several hours on a cold and windy day. In the event, the wind was well over 30kt for most of the journey with occasional gusts over 40kt.

We chose just to beam reach with a scrap of genoa and we comfortably made over 5kt through the water.

While the weather over Hurst Castle and the Isle of Wight looked fine, we were running away from a very threatening sky over Lymington…

But there are times when even a threatening sky has its own magic against a foreboding Hurst Castle and light…

Keyhaven even at high tide was as tricky as ever but by 10.30 we were alongside with doubled up lines…and coffee on the go.

(Boaty detail alert)…She was not due to be lifted out until early Monday and we needed the time while she was still in the water to trace an annoying leak into the bilges which had developed. We checked all the easily accessible sea cocks but could find nothing except a small weep around one of the transducer fittings…and a steady drip from the stern gland. Hmm! Doesn’t really seem enough. All that is left in terms of holes in our boat are the keel bolts. We want to tighten them anyway as they hadn’t been touched since they were renewed 5 years ago. We can get to 6 out of the 8 sets on the Moody (reasonably) easily, but thery all look good and dry. The only thing for it is to take the water tanks out to get to the last pair…who designs boats…grrr. This turns out to be reasonably easy as we had had them replaced when the keels were done. Good and bad news for us…keel bolts all snug and dry and in good condition, but the plumbing of the tanks! Another job added to the lengthening list….

We leave as it gets dark, having taken the sails off and some dodgy looking tins which have been hanging around for a “while”. The tide is due to drop around 2m overnight (low water at 3.30am. We scope the lines properly, but there is always that nagging doubt. We could have stayed on the boat, but the promise of a warm shower plus the fact that the inside of Heydays has not a single useable bunk due to half the interior being removed, means that we take the easy route…so, up at 3.15 and back to Heydays who has taken the ground nicely (the joys of a bilge keel). She’s not hanging by her cleats from the quay so back to bed for another 3 hours kip.

Early morning inspection, plus removing more of the cabin sole, proves definiively that it is a mixture of stern gland and transducer which are the only points of salty stuff geting to be on the wrong side of ther hull…phew!

The rest of the day is spent on the glamorous side of boating…lift out, scrub down..

…and then finally she is in her new home for the winter. Now the work can really start!

The night was windier than expected with the tail of Storm Arwen running past. Again, we have decided leave earlyish despite the foul tide as we need to be back in Lymington with plenty of time in hand to get things off Heydays in preparation for her coming ashore next week. As we have said before, there is something deeply satisfying about hot coffee and toast in the cockpit as we sail into a bright clear day.

With full sails and the wind back in the north, Heydays is broad reaching in a glorious F4 making 6kt over the ground probably against around 1kt of foul tide. Lunch back on the quay in Lymington consists of eating up remains from the store cupboard (yummier than you would think) and some brilliant homemade soup.

These days out on the water are among some of the most memorable and we can at least get her ashore for the winter knowing that while this has not been the most classic of sailing seasons, it has been the best November we can remember.

The night was rough outside although Heydays was impeccably behaved even in the gusts as wind howled through our rigging and that of the other boats close by. We were got up twice in the night by alarms going off…the first was the tac tic instruments complaining about being left on standby with no power, and the second was the hand-held VHF making exactly the same complaint. We never used to make those mistakes, so it just shows how much we are out of routine and practice on the boat as we make good for the night. The morning dawns bright and clear …and very cold. But the river is beautiful just the same.

What to do when you are on a snug boat with nowhere to go and a pub close by??? This bit is less of a sailing blog, but inevitably part of the general sailing experience. Captain Aubrey certainly spent a great deal of time at anchor waiting for winds and tides so we don’t feel so bad. A relaxed (and late) breakfast followed by a trip to the nursing home and then a late lunch in the Master Builder leaves an afternoon for cards, booze and general pottering while Heydays sits gently with just an occasional lurch in the stronger gusts. We play cribbage and feel like we are going back to the fifties when pubs around the country would be full of old men with pints playing cribbage or dominos.