Sailing to the Scillys

I haven't had the urge to blog about creative stuff here, and am comfortable about that, but we have just had a fantastic (for us) sailing trip to the Isles of Scilly, and I wanted to share it here, mainly for Rob and Cally who we bought the boat from, as I'm sure they will love to see that we are finally doing some fun stuff with her.

It has been on of Vince's dreams to sail to the Scilly Isles, and particularly to be there on his 60th birthday, as he had a birthday party there on his 50th. We missed it by one day, but we decided it was officially his birthday 'week' and so he spent that on the islands.

I made him a cake with a map of the Scillys on it as an aid to navigation. I even put the little boat in the right place, which was complete luck as I had no idea where we would be approaching from!

We were very fortunate that a couple of friends of ours, Paul and Sam, were happy to come along for the ride and help crewing. Paul just happens to be a sailing instructor and has done many yacht deliveries, we couldn't have done it without him!

We had Vince's birthday meal on the boat on Tuesday evening and set off early on Wednesday morning. There wasn't a lot of wind, so we motored with a bit of sailing down to St Mawes, where we picked up a bouy and were treated to a lovely sunset and a visit from a huge jellyfish in the morning.

Setting off again in the early morning and with force3/4 predicted we saw very little wind all the way, but just had enough of a breeze to help us along from time to time. Motoring in a sailing boat is a bit tiresome and slow, but the sun shone and the water was mostly like a millpond so there was no seasickness and several sightings of porpoises, sunfish fins (a new one for me) dolphins and diving gannets. We arrived at the Scillys in the last of the daylight, and were treated to another glorious sun set.

We then had three days of glorious sunshine and the four of us split up to visit various islands and friends during the days.

Hope in St Marys harbour

Agapanthus in full bloom everywhere

Morning mist on St Martins

Such lovely clear water, I did go in twice
tho it was fairly cold!

We set off to catch the tides at silly o'clock on Monday morning (1 a.m.) and had a fabulous (if slightly rough for some of us) sail back all the way to Plymouth.

This was when it had calmed down

 Leaving the Scillys and arriving at Plymouth in the dark was very challenging as Vince and I have done very little night sailing, and it was slightly frightening how different the familiar surroundings of Plymouth sound look at night. We were very glad to have Pauls experience to guide us.
 I really felt safe on our lovely boat in the crashing waves, and also very at home down below in the wood lined cosy interior. After several summers of mostly being cold and wet and not really knowing what I'm doing I finally feel I can imagine a life as a boat gipsy one day.

Dolphin sightings

We finally had our first sail of the season. We had to get our boat from Plymouth down to Falmouth to have some work done on her. The weather has been a bit on the chilly side for sailing, but on Friday 5th the wind was in the right direction, we had the offer of help from a friend, and the forecast wasn't toooo cold! We wrapped up warm and had a fabulous sail (and I wasn't too seasick). The best bit was we had four dolphins follow us for about a quarter of an hour. I got a couple of photos and Vince got a video of them. We reported the sighting to Sea Watch and they put our sighting on their sightings page, which made me feel slightly important!

http://seawatchfoundation.org.uk/?page_id=131

and from our pictures and description they were identified as common dolphins.

Below is a link to the video. My camera's pretty basic so don't expect wonderful quality, but you definitely get to see dolphins!....

A still from the video!

um, not sure how to embed a video, try this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI3lCOlQh0

I'm getting really into my book workshop stuff at the moment, so more news on that coming up. 

I'm thinking of starting a separate blog for books, is that a good idea? Hmm, I'll think about that a bit more...

Galvanizing and clouds

Lat week we drove up to Birmingham to collect our re-galvanised anchor and chain. I think this is the only place in the country that can galvanize things with moving parts. They have to be spun to stop the whole lot coming out in one solid lump

A galvanizing factory

baskets of galvanized things

more galvanized things
I could have taken photos there all day,
it was fascinating
I'm easily pleased?!

Our newly galvanised anchor chain

And on the drive home we saw these. Vince has been reading up about clouds, so one day we'll know what the weather is going to do simply by looking at the clouds, ahem (maybe??!!)

lenticularis clouds (they look like lentils, sort of!)

Boat news

The news is there isn't much news at this time of year. 'Hope' is out of the water, propped up with bits of sticks and wedges. We go down there now and then to do maintenance, repairs etc. It's usually pretty cold, but yesterday the sun shone, hooray.

 

Sticks and wedges.
Boatyards are scruffy places.

The view from the cockpit, a 'sea' of boats!

Tool boxes at the ready

Arty photo of some rope

My tools for the day ...

A blurred picture of a hole in the floor inside the boat

The hole on closer inspection.
It was my job to get that water in the bottom out!
It's a long way down there..
hence string, rag and bucket (see picture above)

Arty photo of our boats propeller

Rusty neighbour

Rewarded at the end of the day
with a beautiful sunset across towards our mooring.

Snow and sewing

I have been aware this week that other people have been getting all excited about the snow thing and I've been all 'bah humbug' because it makes it difficult for me to get to work (I'm back lambing this week), and impossible for me to do my other work, gardening. Gardening, ha what's that? I've done so little since November because it's either raining, frozen or snowing! 

This morning I went to a new yoga class which was wonderful, so I'm looking forward to more of that, and then, as the ground wasn't actually frozen, I went to the allotment to dig up some parsnips and horseradish to go with the aforementioned beef. And I got SOAKED. It rained and rained (I was home by now) and then it turned to snow, and I thought that actually it looks very pretty, so I took this picture from our sitting room window. (You didn't think I was going to go outside did you?!)

So there you go, pretty snow, I feel better now.....

Do you see the date stamp, that's a long story relating to my new computer, which has sorted all my photos by date, but as I never set the date properly on my camera....imagine the chaos, I won't bore you with that!

This afternoon I got out my lovely hand crank singer sewing machine. I'm planning to take it on the boat with me when we finally go off on our big adventure, to make stuff and do repairs with, so I thought I'd sew up these hatch covers for the boat with it. It needs a bit of attention, I haven't got the correct bobbins for example, but in general it works really well.

I've also been playing my fiddle a lot. I've had it for two years now and have have played it very little. A few of us from the singing group have started a music group. I played a slow but passable version of the Skye Boat Song last night along with a whistle, a harmonica and two guitars. It probably sounded dreadful, but we were pleased with ourselves and we can only get better!

Alphabet Quilt.

I've been working on this alphabet quilt all year, and I was just about to post about it 'in progress'  during the summer when the person it's for put a comment on my blog, eek I didn't realise they were reading it, so I had to save up posting about it until after Christmas!
 I  took some of the squares along on the boat on our summer trip to do embroidery on them, it was  a great way of relaxing in the evenings.

My original layout

 B is for boat, O is for owl, and C is for cat.... of course!

I had a vague plan it would be a summer birthday present, but  I realised there was no way it would be finished by then. However, I did get it finished for Christmas.

Terrible picture, but you get the idea, I was in a rush to get it in the post..

Finished quilt, backed and edged

I'd better start on next years sewing project now ...

New improved 'sailing pics'

We're home from our 'big trip', so I can fill in some more pictures and text.
First there was a bit of engine maintenance

 Then off we set for Fowey

 It went well to start with, then as we approached Fowey Vince wanted to calibrate the log (thing that tells us how fast we are going) using some transit lines (sorry if this is a bit technical, I can explain if you want, but sometimes life's too short). We got to the start line and there was some mutterings and consulting of instruction books and pressing of buttons while I sailed the boat to and fro, and then we set off, in a straight line from A to B. I was under the impression we needed to do A to B, then B to A then A to B again. Following so far? We did A to B, turned around, did B to A then somebody (not me) pressed a wrong button and we had to start again. I was becoming mrs grumpy by now, and then it turned out we needed to do A to B FOUR more times, ho hum. We did it, and our log is now more accurate than it was, which we will be glad of if we are lost at sea one day. And it was a good day for sailing. Click on this picture for a video... (sorry about the offending fenders Peter!)

Click on this picture for video

The following day, moored a little upriver from Fowey was glorious sunshine, so mrs grumpy was restored to mrs happy!

 I get to do the rowing because I love rowing. We rowed/drifted upriver a bit further and had a lovely walk along the riverbank in Golant, upriver from Fowey

Then, refreshed and restored we set of for Falmouth. The winds were very light and coming from behind the boat, so we had the two sails out, one on each side, which is called a goosewing. One of my favourite, and one of the few self explanatory, nautical terms I know. 

Below is a very similar video with me at the helm, smiling! (and note the calibrated log at the end showing 6 knots)



The wind gradually picked up and we had a great sail, particularly because it's about the first time I haven't felt at all sea sick or stressed. Here's St Antony's Head lighthouse at the entrance to Falmouth.

We then spent a week in wet and windy Falmouth. We went ashore a few times (more rowing opportunities for me), walked here and there, ate lunch in cafes, visited the maritime museum, admired the J class yachts and met up with two lots of friends who also happened to be down there.

Some days we stayed on the boat and read books, watched boats going in and out and did jobs such as rope splicing

 and sewing leather onto the oars to prevent them from wearing out in the rowlocks.

Oh yes, and we did a bit of sailing (not much) and took some friends on a trip upriver, part motoring, part sailing. It would be nice to think we did a lot of this..(home made elderflower champagne of course)

But unfortunately there weren't many evenings it was warm enough to sit outside, it's only June after all!

We had a few lovely sunsets

A very foggy last day. (this is the same view as the sunset one)

 And finally a very lovely sail home, with a foggy start but sunshine later. We sailed all the way back to Plymouth from Falmouth. We were pretty tired, but I wasn't at all sea sick again, Hooray, there's hope (!) for me yet..

This is us setting off, taken by friends from the shore

The owl and the Pussy cat finally set to sea.