What do you know - all was well and good after all. Well, mostly.Thomas and I met Philip at Hornet as planned and after a quick run through of vital systems we'd waved farewell to him and were chugging into the heart of Portsmouth harbour with Wicor on our mind. No massive problems on the way other than another yacht being on the mooring we were supposed to pick up, and we spent the rest of the day getting familiarised with those finer points that hadn't seemed significant enough earlier in the day to bother Philip with. Oh, and the wind caught the forward hatch while I was getting the dinghy out, slammed it into the the deck and did for the hinges. Nothing major and a repair ought to be a simple enough thing. Honest Tim!
The following morning we visited the local BP station to stock up on fuel and then headed out into the Solent. With a light but steady wind we decided to get the sails up and in no time were approaching Cowes. We anchored in Osborne Bay, just to the east of Cowes, for lunch and Thomas promptly decided he was going to suffer from a bout of seasickness. Luckily it passed as soon as we were under way again and he was untroubled for the rest of our time aboard.
Having returned to the mooring that night we decided to putt down the river in the dinghy and see what we could see. The answer? Not much - we'd got about a mile downstream and ran out of petrol. I had it in my head that I'd filled the tank but all I'd done was drain the fuel can. We, or rather I, had to row upstream so I did not row gently, neither did I row 'merrily merrily merilly merilly' and life was certainly not a dream - particularly after I let the painter slip when we got back to Catweasel and watched the sodding dinghy slowly drift away. I leapt back to the cockpit for the boat hook but by the time I was back on the bow and trying to catch the dinghy she was gone. Shorts off, shirt off, Stewart in!
A strong northerly blew all night and was still at it come Friday morning so I decided it would most likely not be a sailing day. We motored out and I had my first experience of why Portsmouth harbour can be such a sod. Well, actually my first experience (aboard a yacht at least) of why a sod can be such a sod - As we came through the relatively narrow harbour mouth we had a gin palace bearing down on us at a rate of knots as he came in from the Solent. I looked about to make sure we were in the right place and all was well but this chap just kept coming. Time ticked slowly by and it became obvious he had no intention of moving to pass on out port side so I heaved the tiller to my left, lurched to starboard and then had to straighten up again before we had an altercation with the harbour wall. The helmsman on the gin palace seemed amazed by this as he looked down from his flying bridge and slammed his vessel into reverse. A member of their crew was despatched to the foredeck to demand an explanation and as I yelled (with perhaps a little too much help from Thomas) "We should be passing port to port, what are you doing!?!?" she yelled "Your supposed to pass on this side of us!", pointing to their starboard beam, "It's the rules of the road!". I was too stunned to reply. I kind of hope they learned from it after a "You'll never guess what happened to us today!?" conversation with a wiser skipper but know that there will be a hundred more out there with the "If it's got a steering wheel I'll drive it like a car" approach.
So that was Friday. Saturday morning was a time of tidying up, locking down and heading home and so we did.
