RYA Sail Cruise

© 2008 - Miss Moneypenny J and K All rights reserved.

The RYA and Yachting Monthly run a yearly sail cruise in company for members to get together and sail across the English Channel to Cherbourg and then onto the Channel Islands before crossing back together again. It allows people to do longer passages knowing that there is help nearby should there be any problems. We thought this was a great idea and should be a lot of fun, so on the 24th June 2007 we set off for Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight.

Once we arrived, we got a welcome pack full of loads of useful things, including our itinerary, customs forms, a new logbook, and trials of new marine products for us to use and report on whether they were any good or not.

We had managed to damage our bow on the way over- we hadn't secured the bow anchor properly and it had jumped off the bow roller and broken a section of our teak rubbing strake. And we hadn't even started on the channel yet!

We congregated in the pub- where else- and looked at the forecast for the next few days. Oh dear. The gentlest it got was a force 5, building to an 8/9 around the time we had to come back! Other people were talking about going over and catching a ferry back if the weather was too rough to sail back across, but we couldn't do that as Moneypenny is our home! So we decided to pull out. We were the only ones who at that stage said "No, we're not going", but everybody else must have had the same thought because in the end no-one went. The cruise was cancelled. It was a real shame, but the weather just did not let up!

On the 26th June we all decided to sail to Cowes. We left Yarmouth in about 20kts, so decided to shake out one of our reefs. This took us 25 minutes as we hadn't set the sail up properly. There was also an interesting moment where Kat, who was keeping the boat head to wind to help with the sail fiddling, had to move out of the way of a huge minesweeper which was coming down the narrow channel. Jason was on the roof and was standing in just the wrong place as she turned the boat. The boom moved over, took his legs out from under him and left him clinging to the boom for dear life! It's funny talking about it now, but we were lucky he didn't go overboard!

Once at Cowes, we visited the Folly Inn, a great pub just down the river from the main marinas. We moored to a pontoon in the middle of the river, which gave us a great opportunity to use our new tender. It worked great on the way over.
And then we started drinking. And drinking. And more drinking. We ended up back on the cruise organisers boat drinking all their alcohol too. It was a fun night. However, at about 2am, much the worse for wear and with no lifejackets, we had to get back out to the middle of the river. Oops. Jay was the drunkest I think I've ever seen him, and he couldn't see why I was upset at him merrily smoking away in our little plastic inflatable boat. I could just see him burning a hole right through the middle of it!
We didn't want to start the outboard engine and wake everyone around us up, so we decided to row over. We had one paddle each, and normally this works great, except for Jay's alcohol fuelled enthusiasm. He paddled like a whirling dirvish and all that happened is we went around and around in circles. The crew for the organising boat shone a flashlight out over the river and were in such hysterics it made us laugh too. However, when we stopped paddling to laugh, the tide took us down river, so we had to paddle extra hard to make up for it.
Eventually, we dd manage to make it to the boat, but it's an interesting lesson in not mixing boats and alcohol!

The next day, ignoring our sore heads, we headed back to Southampton. The wind was 35 gusting 45 knots! We headed out of Cowes, got one good look at the Solent, turned around and headed back again. We reefed right down in the shelter of the harbour and then set out to cross Southampton Water. It took us 3 hours, and once we had the sails set up securely and realised that Moneypenny was handling this much better than we were, we relaxed and it was almost enjoyable. We had to fight the wheel as the autopilot wasn't strong enough to cope in the conditions, so we were lucky it was only a short sail. The waves weren't that big either as the Isle of Wight protects the water, but they were big enough! It was certainly a learning experience!