Monday 19 May
David spent the morning readjusting our steering which was a bit too tight. One of the things I love most about La Bamba is the lightness of the helm. Then he adjusted the windlass which was knocking a bit when the engine was on. We discovered these yesterday on our first sail so that was very useful.
While he did that I went for a lovely walk on the sea wall where the avocet chicks are growing fast, indeed some are already adolescent.
Along with avocets there is a wealth of bird life on this section of wall including little terns dive-fishing, fresh new Canada goslings, oyster catchers catching crabs and swallowing the lot, beautiful white egrets and gorgeous crested lapwings.
In the scrub behind the sea wall it’s a haven for song birds – so far I’ve seen linnets, white throats, reed buntings and reed warblers, stone chats and over the fields a sky lark was soaring and singing his heart out.
It’s also foal time for the New Forest ponies.
Back on the boat with everything fixed we decided to go for a pootle in the late afternoon. The day that had started out grey and cloudy had turned beautiful, sunny and tranquil – an excellent opportunity to check the new reefing points on the main sail.
When we got our North sails the reefing points had been put too far into the sail, making the angle on the reef lines very odd. North sails have corrected that so now’s the time to check them out.
There was barely any wind – maybe 9 knots – so we put in reefs one and two and marked the main halyard and reef lines with tape for next time. The weekenders have left the Solent so we’ve mostly got it all to ourselves. We didn’t even encounter the Lymington – Yarmouth ferry as we went down the river.
The wind swirled around and went even lighter so we motored into Newtown Creek on the Isle of Wight for the night. I was keen to practice with the anchor but Skipper preferred to pick up a mooring buoy – which is also good practice as we didn’t do that either on our way back from Sweden last summer.
The first buoy we picked up turned out to be in only 2.8m of water and as the tide was still on the ebb we decided to move. We draw 2.3 and the tide was going to drop by another meter. You need to be good at maths if you’re a sailor…
So, despite compliments on our expert buoy grabbing from neighbours (who were in 4m) we moved down to the ‘Clamerkin lake’ nearer the entry and I got the buoy first time again with the boat hook. Turns out I’m a pretty good hooker.
We enjoyed the perfect peace and quiet and spotted 3 seals pretending to be part of the wall (too far for photos) while back-headed gulls and terns dived for fish all around us. The silence is occasionally pierced by the unmistakable call of oystercatchers.
The sunset back over Lymington was spectacular
We had mushroom, tomato and cheese omelettes and very much enjoyed our little bit of paradise.
