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We were truly touched at the huge number of boats which turned out to welcome us home on Saturday. And it was especially nice to see that the Tall Ships and J-Class boats also made the special effort to be there to welcome us all home again. Special thanks to Portsmouth for organizing the home coming welcome, and promoting it under the banner of “Festival of the Sea”. A bit grand a title for little us returning from our “around, England and Wales, through Scotland and touching on Northern Ireland trip”, but perhaps a bit more catchy.

Yes we have arrived home safely in Southampton, and are now enjoying a rainy day in Winchester after the last few sunny days of summer. The Solent was absolutely packed with boats when we came through on Saturday afternoon – perhaps most being blissfully unaware that they were roaring past a “happy to be home” yachting crew as they powered past in their SunSeeker or Fairlane stink pots.

There was a fair wind home from Weymouth and we had a little tussle with “Moody Blue”, a 36 foot Moody, before we both tired of the falling windspeeds and put our respective motors back on. It was bright and sunny and we were also finally able to test our recalibration of the ships log using the measured mile (actually 1848m – but close enough to a mile, I’m not sure who got it 3m too long) which is just before Sellsey Bill and Poole. We (actually Maggie did all the hard maths of it) calculated that the log now over reads by 0.003knots. This is close enough for me. Given that we started with a 33% under read, I think we have finally got an accurate log. The final total of water miles travelled was 1556 having adjusted the miles travelled to Inverness using the new log settings. The number of miles travelled over the land will be a bit more as we mostly tried to use favourable tides.

Nicky has enrolled at Peter Simmons College – they admitted her even though she ignored our advice and went to her interview wearing her white jeans which have holes. Her six A’s, six B’s and an A* GCSE results must have just been enough to tip the balance though, and she is now enrolled for 5 AS levels, Graphics, Geography, German, Physics and Mathematics as well as a compulsory Information Technology AS course. The AS is kind of half an A level, and she does the other half next year along with General Studies. The big thrill is that she doesn’t have to wear a school uniform anymore and that she has joined the Sailing Club which get her an RYA “Competent Crew” certificate after a year sailing with them – this from someone who is already an RYA Coastal Skipper and has just returned with enough miles to take her Yachtmaster exam. She also gets to have a go on some Tall Ships sailing to Norway.

Tarryn has an English Presentation to prepare for (along the lines of “What I did in my Summer Hols”) and is going to impress them with her passage plan and pilotage plan from Bangor (Northern Ireland) to Milford Haven. She has also just completed a model of a spice rack out of cardboard which she intends to make in wood as part of her Design and Technology GCSE. Good thing that she made the first one in cardboard, as the current design suffers from a single flaw – the spice bottles do not fit.

Thanks for all your emails while we were going around the UK, and since we have returned. I will eventually get all the pictures onto the web site and may well put together some pages describing the whole journey as some have suggested.

Ricky

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