A short weekend

Which turned out to be shorter than we'd anticipated.

Left the house at 07:00 Saturday and arrived at a quiet Llangwm around 08:30. A group of men and women were launching a Pembrokeshire long boat - out for an early morning row. This popular sport seems to be really gaining momentum, and it's a rare visit to Pembrokeshire now that we don't see one or more of them, practicising or racing. It appears to appeal to all ages, sexes and types of people too.

Louise pumped the dinghy and we puttered out to Ishtar. I realised something was wrong, straight away - one of the cushions under where I'd fitted the new winches and clutches was soaking wet. There was nothing for it but to take the headlining down and pour water on the deck until we found the leak. This would be the best part of a day's work, so we just got on with it.

Notice the loose hanging wires of the guard rail? We did too. Some fine person, it seems, had given Ishtar a clout with their boat, and driven off, leaving no note. There was not much daage - a bent pulpit and damaged navigation light, but it was more work to do to put right. I was not in a good mood by this point. The sun was shining and I wanted to be sailing down the river. Such is life, as they say.

A few hours later and we were getting things sorted. The leak turned out to be a screw hole holding the spray hood on, and I was pleased that all the work I had done had not been the cause of the leak. I managed to straighten the pulpit as best I could, trying not to fall in as I pushed and pulled at it.

By 4 o'clock we sailed off the mooring in a light North Westerly and set off down the Cleddau, it's oak lined banks were truly beautiful in the spring sunshine.

Louise trimmed the sails, following the wind as we twisted and turned our way down the river towards Milford Haven. The wind is fickle in the upper reaches of the river, and can blow and die, veer and back very quickly. Louise struggled a bit at one point, but there was no problem, and it is truly a lovely place to sail. Anyone who is lucky enough to do sail up or down the Cleddau enjoys a rare privilege.



We'd thought about tying up on the pontoon at Pembroke dock, near the yacht club. When we noticed that it had not yet been set up, however, we turned and headed back upstream.

On the way, we passed Jacona - a Nicholson 32, previously owned by a couple from Cardiff yacht club who took her across to the Caribbean and back a couple of years ago

http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-journal-1392359-jacona

We're hoping to meet up with that couple, Dave and Sheryn, soon, and pick their brains on the trip, doos and don'ts, their thoughts on boats for cruising and so on. More if we do.

Anyway. Some people find drifting up and down rivers at the whim of the wind, looking at trees and birds very boring indeed, and would far rather be on dry land. We tied Ishtar up when we reached Llangwm and took the dinghy ashore this beautiful, tranquil evening. 



  

Where, people who did not enjoy floating up and down rivers made their feelings at being ashore known:

Sticks were massacred. Seaweed was torn up. Mud was trampled, splashed and spattered onto people's undersides, water was swam in and panting noises were heard.

We returned to Ishtar, had a meal, drank some wine, listened to the evening turn into night, the gurgling sounds of the water as teh river passed under us, and the sounds of the wading birds heading home to roost.

Peaceful.

It was even more peaceful the following morning. Dead silent, in fact, and perhaps the calmest I've ever see the river:

There was clearly no point in trying to sail, and motoring down the river and back didn't really appeal. We did a few odd jobs aboard Ishtar, did some tidying, drank some coffe and then went ashore, taking Tigger for a walk along the wooded banks before jumping in the car and heading home.



Struggling

Just sitting in the house. We never seem to have any free time. There is always a huge list of things to do. Every penny that comes in has to be carefully assigned to pay for some more work to be done. Will we be able to afford to do the conservatory this year, now that the attic, garage and bathroom are done? Should we pay as much as we can off the mortgage whilst the rates are so low, and leave spending on the house until we've paid it off?

Meanwhile, we want to go diving. We want to go sailing. We want to go away in the van, drink wine, eat good food, enjoy ourselves. We knew it was going to be hard. We're approaching the halfway point in our plans to move to West Wales, and everything is according to budget, and going really well.

Then our friend Tom visits, from the Phillippines. It was Tom that first got us interested in sailing, and, with whom, we got our first taste of what it could be like, crusing from Italy to the Greek islands in his 44ft ketch 'Perky Puffin' in 2007:

Here was a boat that we could live on. Long term. Here was a boat that we could travel on, cheaply. I've always wanted to dive in the Pacific. Rangiroa is near the top of my list. There are so many places we want to travel to, Galapagos, South Africa, back to Sudan, and, it keeps calling me, the Pacific.

Through Tom, we met John, from Tenby. John bought a boat in America, Chelone, and sailed her back across the North Atlantic:

The next year, John sailed down through Portugal, Morocco, the Azores, across the Caribbean, past beautiful islands where we ourselves have since cruised and dived, and then back to the UK. We often pop down to Tenby to visit John - he dives, too.

Then there are Brian and Sue, on their 33ft yacht, 'Blue Bear'. They left Cardiff in October 2010, sailed  the same way as John, but then went through the Panama canal and out into the Pacific. They are currently headed for Fiji.

These are not dreams. These are not adventures one reads about in magazines. These are friends of ours.

We need a boat, a scuba compressor and some time. We have three or four years to finish messing about with houses, and then we may be able to have those things.

Meanwhile, we work, and read about others who do. We plan, and talk. It's hard, and we're struggling.

I read this, earlier today:

"We shared meals ashore and on our boat in the Marshall Islands, drank kava with groups on several islands in Fiji, played with children, sang with locals, taught school children in Indonesia, picnicked with locals in the Cook Islands,  learned how to collect shellfish and prepare them the local way  in Kiribati, traded clothes for local produce in Guadalcanal, sponsored a model outrigger canoe race in the Louisiades, and repaired a solar power system and other equipment in Tikopia. We took locals aboard from several islands for overnight fishing trips, to visit their ancestral atoll in New Caledonia, took a family for two weeks to a Melanesian Arts Festival in Vanuatu and slept on crowded ferryboat decks on the Irrawaddy River in Burma"

http://www.arctracer.com/

The countdown is well underway.

No sailing

No sailing this weekend. We'd offered to help some friends lay some moorings at Dale, and I had to fit a new riser chain to Ishtar's mooring and refit the head bouy. I did that on Saturday. It was lovely to be in the water again, and surprisingly warm for April. I quickly located and undid the shackle connecting the ground chain to the old riser, and attached the new riser in it's place.

Even though it was a simple 'work dive', I enjoyed it. I didn't do a great deal of diving last year, apart from a trip to Lundy and some mooring work, but we're dong more this year, and we have a trip to Scapa flow to look forward to. We're hoping to have a fortnight diving around Oban, too, in June.

Things were going well with the moorings until the outboard engines started playing up on our RIB. Too little use. Spent Saturday evening cleaning out the tank and carbs, and managed to move the 4 x 400kg concrete railway sleepers out to their new positions as mooring blocks on Sunday.

Poor Tigger had a rough time of it. He had decided that running around with a stick protruding straight from his mouth was a good idea. Until it caught the ground and rammed itself down his throat, leaving him yelping in pain. A trip to the vet followed, which gave him the all clear, although he was quite sheepish for the rest of the weekend.

Meanwhile, with 4 x 400kg concrete railway sleepers to move, and a less than perfectly running RIB, strong winds and squally showers, we worked our way through the weekend, an hour at a time. Cold and wet.

Better times to come this year, I hope.

Our other hobby.......

Messing about in Ishtar's dirty, oily, smelly passages, covered in diesel, trying to work out why an almost brand new engine keeps cutting out.

Louise wanted to do it. Good. If something were to happen to me, and I became incapacitated, a basic understanding of the engine, and it's subsystems would be invaluable to her. She removed the top of the diesel tank, after removing everything from the cockpit locker and crawling in. We both expected a tank full of diesel bug, and were a bit lost when repeated syphoning and scraping the bottom of the tank produced only clean, white diesel. Not one globular black lump in sight.

Curious.

Louise next removed the main rubber fuel hose that leads from the tank to the primary fuel filter and blew down it. A lot of resistance. Not blocked, but almost. Finally, a blob of rubber hose came out the other end.

There were more lumps in the filter. When she crawled out of the cockpit locker, fuel pipe in hand, things began to make sense.



This pipe was renewed in January, just over 3 months ago. It was soft and sticky, and clearly breaking up. Louise had bought it at a motor factors - it was not marked as 'marine grade'. I don't know what caused it to perish like that, salt, damp, or the diesel itself, but we'd found the problem, and learned another lesson. Buy marine grade fuel hose. A small section of hose connected to the engine, that had been in place for 16 months was still solid, and looked like new. On it's side was stamped 'Marine grade'.

Ho hum. You live and learn.

We spent the rest of the day doing odd jobs - the ones you never do, 'cos they won't take long, but we'd rather go for a sail. That evening it started raining, and the wind picked up. The sound of the wind and rain against Ishtar's hull is lovely when you are tucked up warm inside, on a quiet safe mooring.

In the morning it was still pouring down, and we got soaked as we used the dinghy to go ashore where we'd arranged a lift home from my father.

An enjoyable weekend. Spolied a little by breaking down again, but, I guess, that is par for the course when you mess about in boats.

Our course, this weekend:

An early trip West

The club had organised an Easter Cruise. About 12 boats had signed on for the trip, leaving Cardiff on Good Friday, Sailing down to Oxwich Bay on the Gower for an overnight stay, on to the Burry Inlet, North Gower on the Saturday, Ilfracombe on the Sunday and then back to Cardiff on the Monday.

There were two problems for us. Firstly, High tide on Monday at Cardiff was 09:38 in the morning, and nearly ten o'clock at night. Louise had to be in work by 10pm, and leaving Ilfracombe at Midnight on Sunday evening appealed to neither of us. Secondly, Ishtar is a fin keel boat. The others are mainly bilge keels, twin keels that can dry out in harbours that do so. Our last trip to Ilfracombe had been a very rolly affair, anchored outside in the swells whilst everyone else slept, ashore inside the harbour.

Bearing in mind that our friend Tom had an unused mooring in Llangwm on the river Cleddau, we made a quick decision to join the club cruse as far as Oxwich, and then head down to our summer cruising grounds in Pembrokeshire earlier than usual.

We set off from our pontoon in Cardiff just after 6am, the sound of diesel engines drifting across Cardiff bay, with the scent of coffee from the boats, clasped in the gloved hands of the cold, bleary eyed sailors, as we entered the 06:30 lock out.

As part of our ongoing learning curve, I retired below and left Louise to it. She raised the sails and set off, doing everything, checking position, making entries in the log, watching the depth sounder, marking the charts, adjusting the sails, judging when to tack, constantly busy, making decisions, sailing Ishtar the nearly 50 miles to Oxwich, the sound of just the wind and the water far nicer than the sound of the engine earlier.

There were boats all over the Bristol Channel, tacking this way and that, some close inshore, others further out. Louise sailed all the way, only finally switching on the engine when the huge spring tide meant that our tacking upwind was almost taking us backwards.

Louise had never anchored before, and was keen to try. She made some mistakes, but eventually heaved over the great hook and 35m of chain, motoring gently astern until the boat jerked to a stop as the anchor bit. We joined some friends aboard their yacht for beer, wine, japanese rice crackers and other nibbles and drinks, Louise delighted, and rightly proud of her growing achievements as a sailor.

As the sun set over a crowded anchorage, we returned to Ishtar and settled in for a peaceful night, rocking gently, the sound of the waves lapping against Ishtar's sides.

High pressure had dominated the UK over the previous three weeks. The forecast had that set to change. The warm, calm sunny days, with frosty mornings and light winds would be replaced by wind and rain before Easter was over. Typical UK bank holiday weather.

When we awoke and upped the anchor at 6am on Saturday, that change had already started, as we set off from Oxwich westwards, Louise once again helming as we passed the Helwick bank and started our crossing of Cardigan Bay.

I simply could not believe it when, a few hours later, our engine cut out again and refused to start. The dreaded 'diesel bug' had plagued us last year, but all new fuel pipes, switching to white diesel instead of red and dosing that with a bug killing chemical had, we thought, solved that problem. Deeply disheartened, I rigged up a fesh Jerry can and we limped into Milford, our tail between our legs.

 Our spirits were soon raised as the sun came out again, and the spectacular blues of the spring sky were simply stunning as we passed under the Cleddau bridge and headed up river.

The tide was huge. Up at Bristol, the other end of the Bristol channel, the difference between high and low tide was around 45 feet! In Milford, it was a much more reasonable 25 feet difference. All that water moving in and out every 6 hours showed:



Tired, but relieved that we'd made it safely, we opened a bottle of wine. Trying to discover what had caused our engine to stop would be best left until morning - it was starting to get dark anyway. The last time we were here, Louise had absolutely loved sitting on deck, listening to the folorn calls of an owl in the oak woods. As she sipped her wine, tonight, she called down to me 'My owl!, I can hear my owl!'

Another peaceful night. We slept in the forecabin - the new bedding and upholstery Louise had worked so hard during the winter to make was supremely comfortable, and we slept well.

Mumbles and back

Louise took Tigger ashore in the morning. Around us, folk were breakfasting, and the smell of hot coffee drifted from boat to boat. There might just be enough wind to sail by, but that was 'on the nose'. So, when we'd all finished eating, and the dishes were put away, we set off under steam, for Mumbles.

Three times we eased back and tried the sails, but the longest we managed, before the wind dropped again, was about 30 minutes. In the end, we motored most of the 20 odd miles into Mumbles, the blue skies and warmth now replaced by an overcast sky, the bright colours of spring, gone for the moment.

The anchorage, beneath Mumbles' famous lighthouse, pier and lifeboat station, was, however, beautiful, and it was flat calm. The holding here was excellent, in thick mud, just off the long concrete slip at 'Knab rock'. With neap tides, and light winds, I did my calculations and left us with about 2 feet under the keel at low tide.

We enjoyed a beer and a warm welcome at Mumbles yacht club. It's been years since we used to come to Mumbles to launch our diving Ribs, and I was a little surprised that the place seemed far less busy and vibrant than I remembered. It was still only March, I suppose.

The sea was like a plate of black glass when we returned to Ishtar. Almost unbelievably, in this sheltered anchorage, only exposed to the East, an Easterly wind blew up almost as soon as we'd made the bed up, and another lumpy night followed. Most annoying. We had no worries, though. Since buying our Delta anchor, about 2 years back, we've never dragged, even though it weighs a miserly 6kg.

Louise had set the alarm for 06:15, but she was very very tired. I quickly dressed, started the engine and pulled up the anchor as she 'came round' and we were motoring away from Mumbles within 10 minutes. Heading SSE to avoid the Scarweather sandbank, the Easterly wind was fine for sailing, so I ran the sails up quickly, before Louise took over. It was a lot colder than of late as we looked back over the chilly water towards Mumbles

Looking Eastwards, across Glamorgan towards Cardiff, the sun was just rising

I left Louise to it, and retired below with Tigger. As the morning progressed, the wind from last night lessened, and by the time we'd cleared the sandbanks and Turned ESE, we were running the engine. We could have tacked back and forth up the channel, but time was against us. We had to cover 40 or so miles by sea, lock in, sort out the boat, then get home to Neath and wash and eat before Louise set off for her night shift.

The more I think about it, the more difficult I realise it is for us. Sailing gives a great sense of freedom, but, at the moment, if Tigger is with us, we still have to pump the dinghy and take him ashore each night, and we must still get back to Cardiff for work. When you travel everywhere at 4 miles an hour or so, you have to plan carefully. It would be lovely to be totally free and not have to worry about being in a certain place at a certain time.

Maybe one day.



Meanwhile, as we approached Aberthaw, a mere 15 miles or so from home, now with plenty of time, we switched off the engine and finally had a reaaly nice sail, tacking back and forth, upwind, setting and resetting the sails, until we were finally back off Barry

Then, an hour or so later, we were locking in and heading for our own mooring on the pontoon.

A bit rushed towards the end, but great fun, with great company.

Porlock Weir

High pressure. For two weeks now. Blue skies, the trees turning green, light winds, and warm air. Just makes you feel like getting out and doing things. Even on Sunday night after getting back to Cardiff Bay from Portishead, I was checking the long range forecast for the next weekend. High pressure every day with no sign of a change. By Thursday, Ishtar and two other boats were planning to sail West for the weekend. By Friday morning, there were 5 boats in the party.

I spent the night aboard Ishtar with Tigger, Louise did her nightshift. I woke at 07:00, put the bed away and sat on deck, shivering, with a mug of steaming black coffee, watching the sunrise over Cardiff Bay.

The crews of the other yachts arrived, carrying provisions and clothing. Louise arrived at 10:00, exhausted. She wanted to get to bed as soon as possible. We decided to lock out at 10:30, half an hour ahead of the others. The noise of the locks over, Louise would be able to crawl under the duvet and leave me to it. She was not alone......

Leaving them to it, I heaved the sails up and set off down past the pier at Penarth and then turning Westwards towards the open ocean. Well, towards the wide end of the Bristol Channel, anyhow. The wind was light and warm. I'd only sailed a couple of miles when I saw the 4 other yachts, Sui, Chausey, Volition and High Spirits, exit the locks themselves. High Spirits indeed!

We drifted slowly Westwards, passing Barry and the Power station at Aberthaw

The wind couldn't make it's mind up, and I kept switching sails, raising and lowering the 'cruising chute' twice before settling back onto the genoa. Louise had risen and helped me raise the large coloured downwind sail the second time.

None of us were in any great hurry to get anywhere. We briefly discussed going to Mumbles, in Swansea Bay, over the VHF radio, but then changed our minds, and settled on the village of Porlock Weir, on the English side of the Channel. We set off under engine power



'There's a big ship in the distance', Louise called won to me when I was making tea. I stuck my head out and could see by the white water of it's bow wave that it was moving very quickly across our path. Louise had already decided to slow and let it pass in front of us.

And then it started. After passing bhind the stern of that ship, and following a morning of almost no wind, we had a few hours of 15 knots from the West, and were soon heeled over, scything through the water towards Porlock.

Where we were soon anchored up just offshore. The Delta anchor scraped across some rocks before burying itself very securely in the sand. We've noticed this before at Porlock - some patches are better than others. We anchored directly in front of the entrance to the inner harbour, in about 3metres at low tide.

Tigger loves going ashore, and ran about with a big smile on his face. I had a smile on my face too, as we walked through this beautiful old village

and had a beer in 'The Ship'



A poor night's sleep followed, unfortunately. With the swells coming in from the West, Ishtar rolled a lot, and the snatching of the anchor chain, added to the fact that we had dragged our anchor here a couple of years back, meant that we slept only fitfully.