Experimenting

The great British Summer (or lack of it) continued with a dismally rainy Saturday.  We escaped down to BV on Friday night and luckily timed our arrival between rain showers.  Unfortunately, having stayed dry, we then woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of heavy rain.  Breakfast in the cockpit didn't seem to be a great idea with the seats awash.

When we did get going it was a case of full oilskins on and make the most of enjoying the sailing despite the weather.

This is me hiding under the sprayhood claiming that I was taking artistic photographs (whilst Nicky steered in the rain).

We did get to see ICAP Leopard 3, one of the fastest monohulls in the world, from very close up as we passed north of Cowes.  Sadly it was chucking it down with rain and the photographs I took are spoiled somewhat from some spots of water on the lens filter.

Also moored off Cowes was a beautiful classic wooden schooner making ready to sail.

One of the only problems with sailing is that cruising yachts tend not to go very fast.  If you just have a weekend it is hard to get somewhere interesting and new and then get the boat back to its mooring again in time for work on Monday.  Being able to have the time to explore new and exciting sailing destinations is the main reason we have decided to leave work and sail full time from next year.  In the meantime we are very luck to be able to keep BV by the Solent.  It's pretty sheltered by the Isle of Wight so we can generally sail any time we have free, whatever the weather.  There are also lots of nice little harbours and anchorages to visit within easy reach of a day's sail.

Newtown, the old salt beds and derelict sea wall

This weekend we didn't go far but headed towards one of our favourite anchorages, Newtown River.  It's a beautiful spot with old disused salt beds that are now a bird sanctuary.  Peaceful and quiet, you feel very close to nature there.

Our first distraction was a smaller yacht that, despite having practically the whole river to anchor in, chose to drop their anchor nearly on top of ours and settled less than a boat length ahead of us.  When the tide turned there was a good chance that we would turn before he would because of the effect of water flow over our long fin keel in comparison with his lighter boat with a thin, more modern, keel.  After politely pointing out that the yacht was uncomfortably close to us with a risk that we might collide when the tide turned, they reluctantly lifted their anchor and stormed off at high speed with the chap grumbling.  We are still not sure why they didn't just re-anchor 30 meters away; there was a lot of space there and plenty of water.

The second distraction came at low water.  We were 2 days after Spring tides so in a relatively shallow river with restricted swinging room there wasn't much water left at low water for a yacht like ours with a 2 metre draught.  As low water came we found that we had drifted to the edge of the river and the keel was touching the mud.  As the photo on the right shows, perhaps a little too close to nature!  When the tide rose a little we re-laid our anchor a few metres closer to the opposite side of the river so that BV would swing properly at the next tide change and hopefully guarantee us a good night's sleep.  It did.

The morning brought bright sunshine and Newtown River was beautiful.  One photograph doesn't really capture the view so I have taken the opportunity to experiment with piece of software that stitches together several photographs to create a panoramic view.  These are the results:

The sail home was also very pleasant and gave me the chance to capture a short video.  Not because the  views were particularly spectacular, more because I haven't edited a video on my computer before and then posted it on a blog.  It turned out to be not too difficult and having worked out how to post the video below I'm sure that it will come in handy to represent some of the sailing and places we visit in the future.