Sailing weekend in Solent

As a birthday surprise Ian took me out for a sailing weekend. He had arranged for us to hook up with Geert (ex-colleague to Ian) who just happens to be about to start his own skipper business. As Geert haven't got his own boat just yet he had rented a nice 12 meter racing yacht called Blue Juice. The rest of the crew was made up by Geert's wife Jane, Jelte, Lorin, Alex and Shaun.

I was completely unaware of Ian's plans and was told first on Friday at 15:30 that I was to go on my first proper sailing trip ever. All very exciting and very unexpected! There I had been packing my passport and the hiking shoes. Was I disappointed you may ask. Not at all! The whole experience turned out to be very pleasant indeed. So good I could easily be tempted to go again. (As long as I can go with Geert and First reef.)

Our first outing was to take us from Southampton and up the river Beaulieu to find us a nice spot to moor for the night. It all took us a little bit longer then planned (mainly due to shopping) so we missed our pub dinner. Oops!

Luckily we had food for cooking, thanks to the shopping team. This was when we realised a few things were as they were supposed to be. Trivial things like a working fridge, temperamental gas stove (kept switching itself off), lack of sauce pans and other vital kitchen supplies. Makes cooking so much more interesting. Well, well, Alex and Jane managed to cook us a feast anyway, in batches! But it did mean we were gunning for the pubs for the rest of the weekend.

Both Saturday and Sunday turned out to be beautiful days. Sunny and blue sky! Water lapping! All very chilled and relax. Plenty of opportunities for water photographing. I was definitely liking it. The guys were however mumbling a bit that there wasn't an awful lot of wind. Good enough for me though.

As Geert is planning to teach sailing in his new business adventure he rather quickly got me involved with the whole steering business. Properly called being at the helm I think.

First time around was under motor so it wasn't that hard. Just needed to calm down and accept that your turning will happen 5 minutes after you turned the wheel.

Second time around was under sail. At this point I was still a bit confused as to what was going on so I spent most of the time photographing the water instead. But you can only do that for so long so Geert spotted me idle after awhile.
I had just got the whole groove thing explained when it was time for tacking. Oh my God! I could barely see the difference my steering did to the sails.Anyway I did a very nice and controlled tack (according to the experts), straight back into the groove again.

I was happy cruising along starting to get a tiny bit of feel for it. Geert was debating if now was a good time for man-over-board drill when our navigator of the day came up on deck. Very calmly he said that now wasn't a good time as we are about to run into a sandbank and we should tack instead. Me struggling with the terminology managed the first part "ready?" and failed to remember the second part. All that sprang to mind was "lederhosen", don't ask me why. Anyway, managed another controlled tack and just as we came out of it the backend hit the sandbank and all of a sudden we were very still.

Not to worry, we managed to get off the bank in just a few minutes. However, I thought that probably was about as much damage I was willing
to inflict on the others. I stayed well clear of the "making the boat go forward" business and reported for kitchen duty instead.

In the end we managed to sail to Lymington for our second night. Third night was spent in Cowes on Isle of Wight. And in between we saw the Needles, some very big container ships and a huge cruise ship. I managed to take loads of photographs, I'll know what I'll be doing this week. On our last day we sailed to Portsmouth. We had some lunch and spent some time seriously tacking our way out of the harbour.