Sojourn to the Solent - the final days

We left Dover at 8am as planned and had a fairly decent sail as far as the North Foreland. Then the wind died away to next to nothing. In hindsight, we then spent too long waiting for wind and should have give up and started the engine sooner

We motored northwards with the genoa rolled away and the main and mizzen pinned in hard but soon we could see thunderstorms building all around us so I dropped the main rather than get caught in a squall with the sail up.

A horrible lump of wet and nasty weather passed astern of us which we just caught the edge of getting only slightly damp. If we'd been caught in the middle of it we'd have got a soaking! We managed, more by luck than judgement, to dodge the rest of the nasty weather

Coming down the Whitaker channel into the Crouch, the wind picked back up to a fairly stiff Westerly which cut our speed somewhat but we got in before the wind over tide built up too much of a chop (it can get quite rough in the approaches to the Crouch in those conditions)

Rik cooked dinner underway and we put a harbour stow on as we motored into the Crouch so that we could make a made dash to the pub as soon as we got alongside at about 9pm. A couple of pints in the Olde White Hart were very welcome

Come Sunday morning, Rik made a dash for the train early doors and I settled down to have a day of R&R in Burnham Yacht Harbour. Given that the tide wouldn't be high enough to get on our berth and, being the weekend, the river pontoon was full, I decided to delay heading up to home for another day.

I left Burnham about 11:30am Monday morning and arrived at Fambridge just over an hour later. It would still be another couple of hours before high water so I rafted to a boat on the pontoon, which was still full, to wait for the tide. A 5.1m tide is only just enough if it makes as predicted so I needed to check the depth before trying to get onto the berth.

As it happened, a combination of a moderate Westerly breeze and a moderately high atmospheric pressure meant the tide didn't quite make high enough so I shifted onto a now vacant berth on the inside of the pontoon for the night.

And on Tuesday the tide made as predicted and I was able to shift Pagan back onto her berth where she settled straight back into her hole in the mud nicely upright.

And that was that. The logs and conclusions will follow later