We’re Off!

Thursday morning, 29^th March, we bade farewell to London and our home in Chelsea. Tom went to work and Susie did the final errands and storage trip. After work, Tom caught the train to Southampton and Susie’s Dad, Richard, drove us down to the marina in Hamble where we were dropped in the car park. That was it. We now lived on a yacht. All our usual surroundings gone in the blink of an eye. This was no usual weekend of sailing in the Solent and driving home on a Sunday night. Our last week had flown by, a mad melee of packing and farewells. It was all surreal. We got on the boat, and felt just a little bewildered. So what did we do? We went to the pub! Much better!

Good Friday dawned and it was time for final boat preparations and weather monitoring. Plus we were wary of a bit of superstition that long cruises shouldn’t start on a Friday and 1st of April is also bad luck! Everything on the boat needed a place. It’s just like moving home – packing is easy, unpacking not so easy. Plus you’re on a boat so it needs to be safely packed. But we got there and with the weather looking good, there was no time for hesitation and our Saturday departure was on!

Waving farewell with our ensign at Hurst Castle!

7:18am on Saturday we slipped lines, targeting Falmouth, a 30 hour sail away. Down the Hamble River, round Calshot Spit and off down the western Solent, hugging the coast to avoid adverse tide. It still felt surreal, another day’s sail. Past Cowes, Beaulieu then Yarmouth, where Tom’s parents saw us although with us being on the English coast we couldn’t see them. Then down towards the Needles and hugging the coast at Hurst Castle where we could see Susie’s parents waving a St. George’s flag bidding us farewell. Now it was real, tears flowed. Richard and Ros have been our biggest supporters and contributors, making and sourcing lots of things for us to help make Adina comfortable. We grabbed our ensign and waved furiously back.

Through the Needles and time to sail. Rats – wind up our chuff as the saying goes, and it was going light. Adina is heavy and needs wind to move. And so it lasted most of the daylight – some sailing, mostly motoring. And it was cold, very cold, no way were we doing long gybes. We saw no more than two yachts. Then into the pitch black, cold night, chilli con carne for dinner warming us up. The wind picked up around 1am and it got colder. To the rescue came Lindsay Cunningham’s gift of hot water bottles! Lindsay is joining us for this year’s Atlantic Rally Crossing in which we hopefully won’t need them! The wind continued to pick up and by 6am we had 21-24kts of wind – the sailing was good.

Adina has an inmast furling main sail. To the layman this means your sail is furled away inside the mast which is pretty standard for blue water cruising yachts. Easy to get in-and-out at the touch of a magical electric button. The downside is that Tom loves big racy mainsails which drops instead of furl, as they give better performance. To compensate, Adina’s main sail has long vertical plastic battens, helping hold shape, which means it actually performs very well. Unfortunately overnight the second longest batten (which is about the length of the boat) had come out of its holding. All night its metal end had bounced on the boom doing a very good job of chipping away at Adina’s white painted boom. In the light of dawn it had dropped to the deck, no doubt now wanting to chip away at the teak decks. This was now a problem with a powered up sail in 25 knots of wind, choppy seas and quarter of a batten poking out of the sail. We worked out a solution, de-powering the sail, and then pushing the batten up and holding it in place by hand while we furled it away into the mast. Worked out well as we needed a reefed mainsail for those winds anyway!

The weather forecast proved true as the seas got rough and the winds were Force 7 touching Force 8 as we sailed downwind. But we got into Falmouth safely making good time arriving at 1030am on Easter Sunday. Being Round the World cruisers, we now have to watch the pennies so no expensive marina… We’re anchored in Falmouth Bay – they still charge £13 a night for that! We’re the only ones anchored. Falmouth town to our right, the green hills of St.Anthony headland to our left, and the dock with two massive grey ships in front of us! Viewed from land, we look like we’re in the prime position sitting in the middle all on our own. Adina certainly looks picturesque but onboard with Force 6/7 winds it’s pretty choppy! And did I mention cold?

So now we start to get used to our life at sea, the car in the garage replaced by an inflatable dinghy in an anchor locker. Learn how to launch it, drive it, lock it up. And scream with pleasure! We need to discover new routines. Sad as it sounds, we like sitting down to breakfast and doing a ‘to do’ list for the day (we can now tick off ‘write blog’). It’s all a new world.

We sit getting ready to cross Biscay to warmer climes in Spain. For this we need a 4 day weather window and that’s not happening right now, but that’s for writing on another day. So from a cold and windy Falmouth, love and greetings. We’re off to find a pasty! Adina out – for now!