TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Last Friday’s visit to the hospital resulted in me being signed off.

My ankle is still sore and quite swollen but I am able to get around and ‘hop’ onto the boat so our plan to visit Porthmadog and ‘FANDANGO’ went ahead.

An early start on Saturday morning loaded with some but not all of our belongings, we set off for Porthmadog on a rather cloudy and rainy morning.

We arrived in Port early and our new dinghy and outboard were delivered shortly afterwards allowing us to make our way to Fandango.

She appears to have weathered the past 8 weeks well and looked smart in her partial new livery, we had not been ablew to fit the new sail handling system; a job still to be done.

Given the wet weather and John and lindy’s new Southerly 110, we acceeded to their request to go onto the drying pad before us, so we enjoyed re acquainting ourselves with Fandango.

Sunday morning we made our way to the drying pad gingerly in the knowledge that the propellor was not set right and uncertain how it would behave, but our concerns were unfounded and we got there without a problem.

Our next day and a half was spent loading and fitting the sail handling system, sails and rigging only to discover that there were no slab reefing points fitted to the system, another job for C and J when we arrive in Chichester.

Some time was spent on resetting the propellor;a wait for the water resulted in an improvement in the performance of the prop as we now could go forward and reverse correctly.

As this weekend was a working one our job was done and it only remained for us to try out the porp settings and get back to our mooring prior to our last visit home to complete our house clearance ready for a departure around 7th. June.

Our ‘sea trial ’ didi’nt go quite to plan as it soon became clear that the feathering on the prop was too fine resulting in us making the progress of a slug to our mooring.

So another visit to the drying pad is planned for next week despite the threat of being neaped.

We are now at home and the packing is progressing, my beloved BMW has been sold and Chris’s Yaris will go on Friday.

The storage company pick up our furniture on Friday and the Local Authority pick up our scrapped setees.

Our family and local friends Bar- B-Que is on Friday night before we leave for the last time for Porthmadog.

So it is full steam ahead, our next report will be once we are underway our first sailing blog is not too far away now. So here we go.2nd