travel

So here we are again. Saturday afternoon and once more doing some final prep and shopping. The remnants of some fairly nasty weather are blowing themselves through, but Sunday looks like it could be good with some forecast NW winds which should be good to help us on our way down the SW coast. It is the day of the Round the Island Race (Isle of Wight) and there was some talk of the race being cancelled this year for the smaller boats. In the event it all goes ahead albeit with a succession of rainy squalls blowing through. We get Heydays shifted from her river mooring to the much more convenient pontoon belonging to the Lymington Town Sailing Club.

Chris and Yee Tak have trundled off to shop for the perishables….and booze, But get holed up in the supermarket while the rain comes down in such torrents that not even a dash to the car is advisable. Meanwhile John and James are sat tucked up in Heydays listening to some carnage out in the Solent as the last of the stragglers reach the finish line just off Cowes. The coastguard are dealing with several ‘PAN-PAN’ messages (these are for incidents which are not emergencies yet, but which could be come one) of people going overboard, steering failure etc. There are also two full MAYDAYS going on with lifeboats out from both Hamble and Calshott. This is not a day to be out we decide.

A brief lull in the rain gets all the necessary stuff on board and we make it to the pub for dinner before the weather sweeps through once more. We meet a very cute cocker-poo called Summer and can’t resist sending it to Yee Tak and James’ number 2 granddaughter….also called Summer. Summer clearly means cute in our unbiased and objective opinion!

Back on board we’re nicely tucked up with a rum when there is a knock on the window and a boat is trying to get into the berth behind us. We dutifully undo all our lines, shift up and redo the moorings. They are very grateful as they have just come from Cowes having been in the race. They later admit they also stopped in Cowes for a beer before heading home. They are all togged up but we gather that one of them is Jeremy Vine….THE Jeremy Vine we wonder?

The morning forecast is for slightly heavier winds than in previous broadcasts, but the suggestion is that the bigger gusts are confined to the East of the area. The weather is fine and with a 7.30 alarm we are ready to slip Lymington for the last time (we hope) for many months.

We leave the river behind in a steady F5 from the NW and zoom through Hurst Narrows and the old Henry VIII fort on the first of the ebb tide.

Rounding North Head buoy off Milford on Sea we wave goodbye to John and Chris’ flat up on the cliffs and we set a course for St Aldhelm’s head in company with a small flotilla of boats making their way back west from the race. With a double reef main and about a third of the genny set, Heydays is happily plugging a sea which is still very lumpy from yesterday’s winds. A fair chunk of wet stuff throws itself at whoever is at the helm. The wind stays very fresh however and decides to gradually shift more and more westward, forcing us further from our planned track than we ideally wanted.

The forecast easing of the wind doesn’t happen and we face a classic wet and bumpy slog for the next 6 hours or so to Portland. We look longingly at the boats already snug on the sheltered moorings in Studland bay and there is an easy decision to change course and head in to join them. In the shelter of Old Harry rocks the motion is instantly easier, and as the fast Condor cat from Cherbourg passes us, we take our sails down and pick up one of the new moorings in the bay.

Footnote. This used to be a favourite anchorage among sailors, but it is also home to some relatively rare seagrasses and seahorses. They have now laid some mooring buoys which are effectively screwed to the sea bed and so repeated scouring by anchors has been prevented much to the relief of the sea horses…

To our enthralled reader who may have been pining for a blog post from us these past 2 and a half years, a lot has been going on with Heydays, but not a lot of sailing!

It all started with a visit to the Green Boat Show in Plymouth in 2022. We had been concerned for some time that although our dear old Heydays is a sailing boat, we were sadly spewing toxins into the sea each year though our antifoul paint. At the show, among all the electric outboards and various generators we came across a product called Finsulate which (according to the very charming sales person) would completely remove the need to antifoul each year as all we needed to do was to stick what looked suspiciously like velour onto the bottom and weeds and barnacles and other assorted flora and fauna would find it impossible to get a toehold (or whatever they possess) to slow us down.

Always keen to try things which seem too good to be true, we went ahead and had carpet (as some sceptics unkindly remarked) stuck to our newly sanded and epoxied hull.

We set of for some mini cruising along the Solent, thinking that we were maybe a bit more sluggish than usual, but feeling pretty smug about how we were single handedly saving the planet. It was only when we saw that we were being overtaken by an old lady strolling on the shore that we realised that maybe we had something dragging us back.

Ever one for convincing ourselves of the opposite, despite the clear facts, we struggled on for a couple of months getting slower and slower until we finally decided to dry her out on the slipway at Lymington.

Now, the original ‘blurb’ suggested that any growth which did appear, could easily be removed by a gentle scrape. It was a warm and sunny late August. Onlookers, in between licking ice-creams or sipping beers, enquired why we had a garden on the bottom of our boat. They were further encouraged when, having failed with light scraping, we took a garden hoe to the jungle we had been lugging around the high seas.

After 2 hours of back breaking, muddy and completely futile work, we gave up and resolved there and then to have it removed. The UK arm of the company by this time had stopped trading and the Dutch company stopped taking our calls or even responding to emails. In the end the Dutch small claims court ruled that the parent company could not be held liable for the product failures as we bought it form a (now defunct) UK company! Never mind we thought, the product info says that it can be removed by hot air or steam. At this point one of the directors of the UK company got involved and to be fair organised some help. Several weekends of hard work finally got the outer layer off, but left a sticky residue which no amount of legal or even illegal solvents would remove (John was a chemistry teacher and even he was defeated by this!!!).

The solution was a complete sandblast, re-epoxy and finally a coat of copper coat which is a tried and trusted reasonably green alternative to traditional antifouls.

Heydays, stripped of her carpet and garden and re launched found a new lease of life and we positively skipped across the waves back to Lymington.

At the time of writing, we are planning our 10^th anniversary cruise around the British Isles, hoping to get to some of the places we missed before or where we definitely want to spend more time. As before, we will take it in easy hops and leave the boat from time to time to come home for family, grandchildren etc. Over-winter at the moment is planned to be Northern Ireland, but plans change….,

….and we keep being reminded that both us and the boat were 10 years younger on the last circular jaunt!