... try and find us

Imagine nonchalantly driving along a familiar highway at 110 km/h with a friend calmly seated in the passenger seat, perhaps with a nice tune playing on the stereo. Suddenly the back door of your vehicle is wrenched open and two black-clad, helmeted dudes jump in ...  while you are travelling at full speed. W. T. F. Not your standard hitchhikers. The sailing equivalent of this happened to us.  Read on. We left Yealm under beautiful conditions.  The wind wasn't in a perfect direction and required us to do some tacking but we were happily cruising along south-west towards Falmouth at six knots (12km/hr).  The forecast was for the wind to stay north-west and gradually become more westerly later in the afternoon and bring with it rain. We figured we would motor the last hour or so if the wind was against us. Glorious sailing - sunshine and even vaguely warm! We tacked a couple of times but the wind kept moving, from north-west to west and then south-...

For Wendy and Graeme's last few days with us, we didn't want to succumb to the ease of staying in a marina.  Following some good advice, we decided to head for a small river that was a two-hour voyage from where we were tied up. Out the entrance to the left and around the point lays the River Yealm. Rounding this point looks much tougher on the charts. After arriving at the visitor pontoon in the fading light last night, we spent today wandering the two towns straddling one of the River Yealm estuaries. On the visitor's pontoon.  No walk-ashore access - time to blow up the dinghy. We came ashore here and walked to town. It made for a very pleasant 20 minute stroll. The tide was going out and we had been told by the harbourmaster that we could walk across "stepping stones" from the town on one side of the estuary to the other side.  We weren't perfectly clear on how this would look, but we thought we could always come back to the dinghy a...

Sailing to another country is always fun and particularly so when you have crew aboard who are doing it for the first time.  Make that passage a crossing of the English Channel and it is truely exciting! Crossing The Channel, no matter how many times you have done it, requires some planning.  Not only does it have some of the busiest shipping lanes on the globe, it also has some of the zippiest tides. Add in a bit of winter weather and you can understand why so many shipwrecks litter its shores.  Our proposed route from Cherbourg to Plymouth - skirting under the Casquets TSS Our plan was to sail to Plymouth on the Devon coast.  This adds an additional complication of the Casquets Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS). TSS are put in place to keep the shipping traffic separated in narrow busy waters. The challenge for us, as a small pleasure craft, is we cannot cross a TSS willy-nilly, it must be either avoided or crossed perpendicular to the traffic flow.  The Casques...

Storm Darragh was a beauty, the second named storm in as many weeks. With wild seas and hurricane force * winds forecast, we were happy to be snugged up the the Chantereyne Marina.  Certainly not the day to be crossing The Channel! We prepared the best we could.  Put out all the fenders, doubled up the mooring lines, took down the bimini, flags and secured halyards and sheets.  We ensured we were stocked with plenty of provisions (wine, cheese, wine... we are in France after all!).  We even hired a car so we could drive out to the Goury Lighthouse at Cap de la Hague and watch the crashing waves. That's a pretty gusty forecast! And did it blow! The boat was heeling over in the slip and we had a sustained 40kn (80km/hr) with gusts up to 60kn (120km/hr), for days. Flights, ferries, trains and buses were cancelled or delayed, bridges and roads were closed, trees uprooted, roofs torn off and power was cut to approximately 2.5 million people. Four people lost their ...

 We have come to Dartmouth harbour with the desire to get wheels for the boat ... but not the kind you think. We DO want to go ashore, but unlike these folks, we are happy to leave our boat behind. We are free to go anywhere that has ocean access, but once we drop anchor and step ashore, we would like a bit more range.  After some consideration and much research, we decided that folding bikes - Bromptons, specifically - would speed up the inevitable trips to port offices, the supermarket, museums and places of interest. Kate, speeding around the Plymouth dockside on a borrowed bike Due to some good fortune, we were at a marina in Plymouth (back in May) and met up with a friend who needed his bike transported back to Cherbourg.  When we offered to take it for him, he kindly offered for us to "use it if you want to."  He had just the brand of bike we had been considering and after having one to test ride, we quickly fell in love with the compactness, light weight, clev...

After a week of splashing the boat, loading our stuff on the boat, re-acquainting ourselves with the boat, having new things added to the boat, provisioning the boat and then preparing the boat ... we are on the move again! Victoria Marina We arrived from Cherbourg after a seven hour motor through dead calm waters and almost no wind. It was well after dark when we pulled into the harbour and we tied up to the Waiting Pontoon. The marina itself is behind a seawall and is entered by way of sill.  The sill maintains enough water in the marina to keep all the vessels there afloat through a potential 9 metre tide cycle.  It's a very clever arrangement. It requires all the mariners, both arriving and leaving, to know where we are in the tide cycle and therefore how much water is above the sill. Sill at High Tide ... and at Low Tide. Provided you know your vessel's draft and are aware that the sill is 4.2 metres above the low water measurement on the tide cycle, there should b...