September Week. I - Chichester to Cowes.

Not quite a a week, more than a long weekend, but at last we had some decent weather and a few days off to use it.

Reasons to buy a boat - 103

If you stay at home, you may be tempted to change the brake pads on your car to save money.



You get filthy and tweak a muscle in your back. It's worth paying someone else.

But anyway, we travelled down to the boat on Sunday, intending to head off to the Folly for dinner. It was supposed to be F3-4 according to the board at the marina. That's not what it felt like as we rounded Chichester Bar at about 3pm and realised that we'd have the wind on the nose and a nasty 1 metre chop for the five hours or so to Cowes.

Missy looked awfully relieved when I suggested that we turned straight around and had fish and chips at the Ship instead!

Our second attempt was much smoother. We still had a decent breeze on Monday morning, so kept the main reefed down, but the sea was much flatter and the sun started to shine, so it turned out to have been a good decision.


I was feeling so confident that I decided that I was going to sail down to the Folly with the wind behind us. Fortunately I remembered the chain ferry before we got into the river. There would have been much chaos and panic on Moonshine if it pulled out in front of us, so the sails came down pretty quickly!

We parked on the visitor's pontoon about twenty minutes before the water taxi started up, so Clemmie had to cross her legs for a while, since she's still not prepared to wee on anything but solid, dry land, preferably with a nice patch of grass.

Dinner was great. A huge piece of ham hock for Missy, which was big enough for Clemmie to get the leftovers as a treat in each meal for the next three days.