After a frustrating Friday sweating and swearing at the boat, we made a last minute decision to head to Cowes on Saturday. Hot & sunny makes for great sunbathing conditions, but alas, no so great for sailing. So in 6kts of wind, we bobbed over to Cowes, with the occasional bit of motorsailing added in for kicks.
Testing the location of the new aft deck seating - once we get back from the CI's, we'll be building them out of aluminium and getting everything painted up.
The Solent lived up to it's Saturday afternoon reputation, with boats aplenty and enough larger vessels to keep things interesting.
Into Cowes, we were greeted by Christopher who was in town as well this week..... http://pendennis.com/yachts/christopher/
Everything was looking booked up but as luck would have it, a good friend of ours had just taken a berth opposite the pub so we broke our standard rule and rafted up against him. As much as the boat annoys me at times, having twin engines pays for itself time & time again.
Another Cowes sunset...
After a pub evening, Sunday morning came about and we made an early start back to Hayling. With full sail up and 8kts of wind on the beam, we happily moved along at 4kts, increasing to 6kts as the wind perked up to 13/14ks. Given the bottom of the boat needs a good scrub, having not been properly anti-fouled for two years, these are good figures for heading off to do long distances. The autopilot did a great job as well although I'm looking forward to fitting the Aries and seeing how that handles the weather.
Now, remember the kettle I mentioned earlier? Previously that would use 10% of our power when running. With the new wiring setup however, it used 2%. It turns out we have some interesting charge controllers installed that trickle feed the batteries, but the second a big load is placed on the system (say, a kettle), it diverts all the charge to that. I'm not 100% with that setup as I'd prefer our batteries to be topped up to 100%, but we'll see how this setup goes for the next two weeks and go from there.
So there you have it folks. One final test done and with the wind looking good for Wednesday, we're taking the afternoon tide to Yarmouth tomorrow, then at 02:00 Wednesday, striking out for the 85nm hop across the Channel to Guernsey.
40 weeks to go....
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