I arrived back from a long hot week in Nigeria on Saturday evening and headed straight for Portsmouth to sail to Cornwall. Lovely bright sunshine, but a howling gale.
On Sunday morning we woke reluctantly in the cosy snug of the aft cabin after a night of torrential rain and wind singing eerily in the rigging. It’s amazing how scary that noise can be - like a horde of banshees singing their different laments for the souls of drowned sailors.
However the morning was almost windless when my two nephews joined us, and we set off West towards Poole, motoring rather a lot of the way for lack of a breeze. The tide was running fast out through the Hurst Narrows, and we at last managed to pick up enough wind to sail out to the Needles, bright in the sunshine, but with the sea beyond a white cloaked mystery of fog.
Across the bay the wind freshened from the East and we arrived at Poole at 5 knots, before heading up to Town Quay. Here the lovely Lindsay said that "if we breathed in a bit" we could moor alongside right outside the Marina office in front of the UNICEF yacht. It was a tight squeeze,but we turned straight in, and stopped dead in the slot - engine off almost before the first mooring line was on. The position was perfect for greeting our granddaughter (6 months old) when she arrived with parents in tow to try out her own bunk that I had rigged in the aft cabin.
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