A quick update on what has been a slow week for us.  We had a fab bank holiday weekend with Jez’s brother Chris, his wife Saff, and our niece and nephew Lily and Tom after picking them up from Poole.  We had a short sail to Swanage Bay where we anchored for the night.  An evening trip to shore in the tender proved adventurous when we found the pier that we had left the tender tied up on had been locked on our return!  Jez had to scale the barb-wired gates to get in and pick it up, then come inshore dodging the rocks in the dark to pick us up!

Thick fog the next day didn’t spoil our fish and chip lunch in sunny Swanage before motoring back to Poole, and we were privileged to see several dolphins having a feeding frenzy just outside Poole which certainly made our day!

We collected our new asymmetric sail on Tuesday and have returned to Hamble to buy sheets and a halyard (ropes) for it,  and we have had a hook made up and fitted to the end of our main boom to use for recovering a man overboard (or in our case more likely to be woman overboard!).

We had Gale 9 forecast yesterday, we recorded gusts of 40 knots, so we stayed put in the marina, but after a few jobs today we are about to head off out of the Solent once more, and get ourselves ready for crossing the English Channel when the weather improves.