The day I arrived back at Heathrow it was warm and sunny but it didn’t last. After a lovely Fun Day at Minima by mid-week it was unseasonly cold. The last weekend in May is a bank holiday and we planned a sail across the channel to France so the weather was predictably cold and windy. Despite everything, dressed correctly (there’s no such thing as bad weather only wrong clothing) Joe, Kevin and myself had a great weekend sailing west through the Solent to Yarmouth and then on to Poole harbour and Swanage Bay. 

There we snoozed in the cockpit until, well you could say predictably, the wind started to blow hard across the water from the north. It was time to move as we wouldn’t get any sleep anchored on a lee shore. Swanage Bay now looked a good option as we wouldn’t be able to get out of any other deep water anchorage in the morning due to it being low tide then (we’ve run aground too many times to count in Poole). Out past the Sandbanks Ferry again, everyone else travelling in the opposite direction coming home from a day on the water.

Friends from our home marina on Musketeer were already anchored under the white cliffs of Ballard Down on the north side of the bay close by to the only other boat in the anchorage. It was too rolly with the left over swell from the previous day’s gale to raft together so Temptress anchored close by. And it proved to continue through the night as well so what sleep we got was a little restless. Then yesterday under partially cloudy skies we headed back to Portsmouth with the wind once again forward of the beam but it was a cracking sail with the tide almost all the way. In through Hurst Narrows via the North Channel, threading our way through the starboard tackers, past Cowes and on up the Solent back to our berth. It might have been a tad colder than Bahrain but we had loads of fun on the water. Thanks guys for a great weekend.