Second Sunday.

Sunday free-flow at the marina started at 10:30 so, with no lock to negotiate, we didn't have much of an excuse not to bite the bullet and try our first two-handed sail with Moonshine.

So it was on with the sea-dawg's lifejacket, plenty of scratching of heads about what order to slip the mooring lines, and off into the not-so wild blue for a brief jaunt.

With a southerly breeze and our lack of experience we motored up the channel rather than getting the sails up. Heading into the wind was more pleasant for Clementine, who isn't enjoying the current hot weather at all, poor thing.

We headed out to East Head and the throng of anchored boats gathered there, before working out that with the tide starting to ebb quite quickly, if we headed out over the bar as originally planned we were going to be out for hours. (maximum ebb over the bar six knots, maximum hull speed of Jaguar 27 6.2 knots or thereabouts) We thought it better to turn around and try our first attempt at actually sailing in the shelter of the harbour, so a quick spin around and just the genoa up, and we were hurtling along on a reach at all of 2.5 knots. Hmmm, mainsail? Yay, 3.5 knots. First observation from someone who is only used to 37' and larger charter boats - isn't it easy to get the mainsail up on a 27' boat?

We had a lovely, if too brief, sail back towards the marina, with everything becoming altogether more peaceful without a two-cylinder diesel rattling our fillings. With a fairly light breeze we saw almost six knots over the water, which bodes well for future travels.

We locked back in (not quite the M25-like queues of last Sunday) without too many dramas, filled her with diesel (and found that a breather pipe has been left off the fuel tank after her refit, so we found out that a small amount of diesel makes a very large mess in water. something to be fixed next weekend) and got back onto the pontoon with a big sigh of relief.

Hey, we now know that we can sail two-handed :-)