Hello sailors of Steemit, and anyone else who wants to hear about my adventures sailing yachts around the south coast of England. I want to tell you about a really awesome and rewarding trip out we had this past weekend.
The yacht we were going to be sailing lives in a really beautiful marina on the south coast, but at low tide there isn't enough depth in the river beyond to get her out without touching the bottom. You have to choose quite carefully when you are going to leave. Maximum tide was going to be at around 2am, so from roughly 11pm onwards there is enough water in the river to allow us to get the boat out. The marina is protected by a huge lock, which allows the boat to move beetween the deep water where she lives, and the variable water in the river. I've always enjoyed going through the lock :)
After leaving the lock a little after 11, we had are a few really spooky miles of river to navigate in total darkness, until you get to the really deep bit near the sea. Here you can safely tie up to a mooring buoy and get a bit of sleep, which is exactly what we did.
At around 7am we got up and headed straight out to the open sea, at which point the tide was again near its low point. This gave us more or less 6 solid hours where the current would be pushing us East, which is exactly the way we wanted to go - simple!! As a bonus there was a solid 12 - 15 knots of wind behind us making the trip even easier.
Sailing downwind is really not a very technical affair - you basically want to get as much sail out as you can handle, and make it so that it all looks like a giant parachute. We had two sails on the boat, so we put one out on each side in a configuration known as 'goosewings', you can probably guess why it got that name.
It's pretty rare to get such a favourable mix of wind & tide when sailing, and we absolutely roared our way East for most of the day, until reaching the city of Brighton. There's an ok marina in Brighton with loads of restaurants and stuff, so we decided to go in and tie up there for the night.
I'm going to do another post shortly, where I'll tell you about a very different kind of journey we had the following day, trying to get the boat home again.