Well I’m sorry for the delay in getting this post done is has been a challenging few days
, anyway we left Torquay marina after being stormed in for a day just after 5.30 on Thursday 9th June to catch a good tide to speed us past Portland bill a place where the wind and tide can make a very dangerous sea condition call the “Portland race” its best avoided at all costs by either planning your tides well and knowing your exact speed, difficult when sailing, the other option is to go far enough off shore to miss the race altogether, the second option was what we went for, planning to go 3 miles off, should have been on a 093 degree course but with the winds we had the best we could do was 103 degrees, this took us nearly 6.5 – 7 miles off.
Every this was going OK we had a good wind, to much so we had a double reefed main and a few rolls of the head sail up and was still doing around 6-7 knots (our max was 9.7 going down a wave) the sea was supposed to be slight or moderate but it was more rough but as usual tiger lily showed us that it can deal with a decent sea and wind easily.
Our first 10hrs crossing Lyme bay with the wind and tide with us was fun and with very few problems, at just after 2 pm the tide changed and the waves really kicked up, with waves hitting us on the rear corners of the boat it was getting a little hairy, Christine said we should drop the sails and motor with the waves directly on the stern and we did and it eased the swell but it was still about a 7ft swell.
So at 2.45 we started to head direct into Poole bay via anvil head, we had a few big waves come to the back of us but we had little problem once we got into Poole bay we even put the head sail out a bit to motor sail.
The original plan was to anchor in Studland bay but once we got there we realised that after the 12hrs of pretty hard sailing we couldn’t be bothered to work out tide and chain length to anchor and just headed into Poole to find a berth, didn’t realise that getting into Poole would take as long and after a few confused moments we finally got tied up in Poole Quay marina, again we still are having problems with mooring as the back of the yacht always kicks out once I put her in reverse, haven’t sunk her yet and touch wood haven’t damaged more than our pride.
Two Geordies Sailing 