Anchoring & Old Friends

Friday 23 & Saturday 24 May

The wind is freshening today as we headed out of Lymington and took the tide and wind East along the Solent. Whizzing along!

There’s always something to spot on the Solent. This pair seem to be practicing for James Bond or something. The helicopter hovering a few meters above the motorboat as they speeded along in lockstep. Later someone dangled down on a wire…

We are still going through our list of firsts: recently we tried out the cutter sail, did our first overnight mooring on a buoy and today it’s first time using the anchor!

All the way back from Sweden last summer we never used our anchor once, so we sailed round to Osbourne Bay to make sure the windlass works smoothly. 

I love our windlass because instead of having to guess or count the meters going down (or try to spot coloured marks on the chain) we have a chain counter on the control so you can easily see how much chain you’ve let go.

We were in 4m depth of water : so the rule of thumb is 5 x depth – we let out 20m. Then we thought about the tide still coming in for about another meter so we let out 5 more meters.

Then David spent half an hour looking for the snubber… this is why we are trying out everything… but eventually found it second time through the lazarette.

A snubber is a length of rope with a special clip on it that you put on the anchor chain and then cleat off on the boat. This is to take pressure off the windlass and is good for windy anchorages or choppy seas:- basically a rope can stretch, a chain can’t.

At anchor we relaxed and watched craft small and large enjoying the windy conditions.

The anchor lifted again smoothly and I dipped it up and down to wash off the black mud.

As it was past 6 we decided to stay the night in Cowes rather than flog up the Solent against the wind and tide… As we rounded the point we saw a Contessa 32 and David said: ‘One of these days we’ll see our old boat ‘South Haze’,’ then we saw the sail number: 5555Y ‘It IS ‘South Haze’!’ Nice to see her in such good nick.

Unfortunately we had our sails down otherwise they could have seen our sail number: 5555N – our nod to Contessa days crashing round the cans in our 20s and family holidays with the girls.

We ended up parking right next to the Clipper training fleet, close to CV9, who was called Qingdao when David sailed her from Cape Town to Geraldton & from Qingdao to San Francisco in 2011/12. So that’s 2 old friends in one afternoon!

All the Clipper boats are now called noble things like ‘Adventurous’, ‘Courageous’, ‘Curious’ so we kept coming up with other possibilities: ‘Contagious’, ‘Furious’, ‘Fatuous’, ‘Bilious’….

We went back to our favourite fish restaurant, the Smokey Lobster. The Clipper crew were quiet and civilised as they will be up to do a practise Fastnet race tomorrow.

We left around 9am as the tide turned in our favour. It’s wind over tide so the Solent is choppy with little white horses – I expect it’s rough in the Channel today.

We had 2 reefs in the main and I still felt overpowered at times – in which case you either let out the main a bit or, better still, luff up to wind.

The wind was a steady 22 gusting 26 – Force 6. Over the ground we were pushing 10 knots with help from the tide. Which is bouncy enough for me.

We called ahead to get help coming into our mooring in stronger winds; we are getting better & it’s always better to ask for help rather than wish you had.