Shake Down Cruise - Day 1

The Bosun, the Purser and the Skipper hit the road early afternoon after filling the Bosun's car to near bursting point with kit! We had a good drive down and arrived at Tollesbury mid-afternoon to find Erbas afloat, as expected, on F pontoon.

There then ensued a session of marina barrow rallying, I'm not convinced it'll catch on as a mainstream sport though.

Now we had to start working out the stowage. The first snag became evident when we went to make use of the under berth space forward of the water tanks under the v-berth.

The anchor warp was lying on top of the storage net which it didn't ought to be. I hauled it all out to the point where I reached the chain. Then onto deck to haul all the chain out of the locker. This was inevitably a dirty job with dried mud and rust flakes going everywhere!

At this point, we discovered an item for the "to do" list - the octoplait anchor warp is properly spliced to a very short length of chain which is then shackled to the main chain. No, I couldn't believe it either. I doubt the warp has ever been out of the locker because there is no way that shackle is coming out of the pipe (and in the unlikely event that it did it wouldn't go back again anyway)

We stowed the warp nearly in the locker and then ran the chain back in leaving re-splicing the joint to another day when I've retrieved my rope work kit off Brigantia.

Now Jane and I could get on with stowing our gear whilst Glen claimed the starboard saloon settee berth (first come, first served). We hit a snag in that there isn't a space big enough to store our kit bags so Jane emptied the contents into the generous overhead lockers. That works well enough.

The Bosun and I set about trying the new anchor - a 15kg copy of a Lewmar Delta which I've got on a sort of loan / approval basis from Jim (Full Circle). It's on the limit size wise as the end of the shank is as close as it possibly could be to the windlass gypsy when it's stowed but it does stow nicely thanks to the stainless steel plate that protects the bow.

By now it was well past hungry-crew-o-clock so we decanted the stew Glen had made earlier into two pans and got it warming up. I espoused the belief that there was perhaps a little too much stew but it turned out I was entirely incorrect in this assumption because we are a pair of greedy fat brothers (ha, you thought I was going to be rude there!)

Jane volunteered to wash up and sent Glen and I off with her blessing to have a beer or two in the club. The beer was good so we had three or four!

Back aboard, coffee and rum by the light of an oil lamp rounded off the evening nicely.

Oh and the weather. Yes. We changed our plans on the basis of a forecast South-Easterly F5 gusting 6 or 7. What we've got is a Westerly F2. I don't expect miracles from weather forecasts but you'd think they could at least get it in the ball park!