After a quiet night at anchor, disturbed only by the God awful racket I made whilst trying to quietly check the depth and anchor rode in the middle of the night (the crew have requested that in future I should endeavor to make as much noise as possible since this will almost certainly by quieter) we were in no rush this morning.
It sounds lazy but in fact all we'd achieve by rushing would be to be too early for the tide to cross the Ray Sand so we'd have to go the long way round and beat all the way back up the Whitaker
Much the more cunning plan was to have a relaxed breakfast and then catch the flood down the Rays'n so that's what we did!
Whilst setting up the route on the chart plotter I discovered its date and time were wrong. It ought to be picking it up off the GPS and wasn't. After much fiddling, found that a system reset fixed it but that put all the settings and page layouts back to the defaults. Hmmm
Time to set off so we hoisted the anchor only to discover that the voltage drop caused plotter to turn itself off. Once turned back on, well of course the date and time was wrong so we had to reset it again.
Putting that problem to one side for now we motored out past the moored sailing barges and got the sails up. It was fairly breezy and I'd contemplated putting a reef in so applying the golden rule (don't think about reefing, reef) we kept the first reef in the main.
We had a cracking sail close reaching just off the mud flats down to the Raysand North buoy. I'm convinced she's got more to give - the rig tension is floppy, sail trim wasn't perfect etc - but I didn't care as we were romping along in fine style
We slipped across the sands into the outer Crouch and came hard on the wind. A lack of attention put us just the wrong side of the imaginary line that marks the edge of the Shoeburyness Firing Range and we got scared off by the guard boat Sentinel sounding a klaxon at us and then very politely asking us if we could please stay north of the buoy line on the VHF.
That meant shorter tacks but never mind. We need the practice! Erbas is very quick in stays, she spins around on a sixpence in no time at all. The downside is that this leaves the crew with much grinding of winches to sheet in the genoa and this, in turn, leads to much gnashing of teeth
We made good progress into the river disturbed only by the constant dangerous vessel alarms from the AIS. With three of the Hav spoil ships in the river, all within the default danger range and all transmitting an AIS signal every few seconds it got a bit wearing.
Never mind, we got past them without a collision (!) and as we approached the moorings of Burnham started the engine and dropped the sails. A quick call on the radio arranged a berth for the night in the yacht harbour into which we parked very neatly.
Jane and I walked up to the Co-op for some bits and pieces and then nipped into the chandlery to pick up a nice big bow fender.
Back on board, Rik and Glen had discovered that the chart plotter would pick up the date and time off its internal GPS provided the instruments weren't turned on. Rik proposed a theory that the plotter was sending the date and time out on the NMEA before it had got a fix from the satellite and then reading it back in and assuming something else on the bus was providing the date and not bothering.
Presumably, this is why the NMEA input to the plotter had been disconnected. I had a sudden thought and went digging in the settings and found that I could turn off specific NMEA data strings on the output. Killing the date/time string fixed the problem! It also cured the VHF not getting a position off the plotter.
Much fun was had whilst the Purser cooked dinner with the Skipper, Mate and Bosun all in sad b*st*rd mode perusing manuels with occasional cries of "hey look, it can do xxx".
Dinner put a stop to that and afterwards we strolled down the sea wall into Burnham for a couple of pints before staggering back and hitting the sack.
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