Monday, July 21, 2008

Towards Plymouth

20th July
It’s Sunday and the start of our second week. We got up early to leave on the high tide – the access is only about 1 hour either side of high water so if we missed it, we would either be sailing at night, or else staying for another day. Despite the forecast of strong winds, we motored out into a very light breeze so there wasn’t much point in getting the sails up. Luckily it isn’t far to Plymouth so motoring all the way will be tedious but won’t take too long.

We decided to try a liveaboard trick of doing washing whilst going along. The theory is that you put soap, water and clothes into a big bucket and they slosh about as you sail or motor, effectively acting like a mini washing machine. It worked up to a point – the clothes were wet and soapy, and they sloshed about quite merrily, but the clean element seemed to be somewhat lacking! Actually, it wasn’t quite that bad. The clothes were fairly clean but needed a bit of manual intervention to get stains and marks out….

When we got to Plymouth, we headed in to Queen Annes Battery and attempted to tie up to their fuel pontoon. Unfortunately, despite the huge “No Mooring” sign, a very large commercial vessel was taking up most of the space and we only had a 6 metre space to tie up a 10 metre catamaran! After taking 4 lines from 3 corners, we finally had Talia secure enough to find a hosepipe to start filling the water tanks and to VHF the office to get someone to come out to give us some diesel.

Afterwards, we sailed across Plymouth Harbour to Cawsand Bay and anchored for the afternoon. Despite all our activity, it was still only half past one when we finally stopped. As the sun was shining, we proceeded to turn Talia into the equivalent of a Chinese laundry by stringing all our washing out to dry…..

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