A sailing adventure to the Baltic Sea…….and back!
Well we have started our trip! On Friday 19th May we got Grace ready to leave her home port of Chichester for 18 months, if not for good! This required a last visit to Dell Quay and the Crown and Anchor!
Chichester Harbour
Towards The Crown and Anchor
Brighton Marina are expecting us! We just have to arrive…..
We will lockout of Chichester at about 7am. It will take us about an hour to cross the Bar and reach West Pole. At the marker we will steer 130 for the Boulder buoy off Selsey Bill. It is about 6nm.
From Boulder we will head to the East Borough Head Buoy on a bearing of 90 for 6.5 nm.
Then we head towards Brighton on 75 for 22 nm. With the wind expected to build toward F5 in the afternoon on 225 giving us a broad reach and with a favourable tidal stream of 1 kt we hope to be by 18.00 on a rising tide.
Well this is it, the weather looks good, tides are neaps and the tidal flows will help us for the last half of our trip. The wind direction should mean a nice fast broad reach….so everything is set fair!
We are planning to take Grace out of Chichester for the last time tomorrow and sail her to Brighton on the first leg of our adventure! She won’t be coming back to her home port for 18 months.
It will be our longest single trip of almost 50nm so it will be a long day tomorrow. We can break in Littlehampton if we need to and finish the trip to Brighton Marina on Sunday.
The pictures are from my handy Navionics route planning app. We will do all the proper chart work tonight.
Discovered this American Sailing Association game covering the different points of sailing. It’s quite educational and quite fun too! It’s more difficult than real sailing!
I’ve discovered what these two switches control. They link to the two main batteries to a 240v inverter to give a 240 v supply to a pair of sockets on the main panel above the nav station. This will be fantastically useful when we are not connected to shore power!
They have arrived ! A lovely pair of matching new fenders to replace the one we lost coming out of Bembridge. We were concentrating so hard on following the tortuous channel out of the harbour we failed to notice that the fender was swept away!
Getting ready for the off, now our Cruising Association pennant is flying high!
And we set up our cockpit tent without a hitch!
It is now a bookend! This is the first use of many that I can think of for my Wateralmanak in Dutch!
We were planning on taking Grace to Brighton this weekend, a sail of about 45 miles with a stop over in Littlehampton but the weather turned out to be horrible. So we took the opportunity to find and take all the things, clothes, shoes and so on that we might need for our Baltic cruise. There was a mountain of stuff which we packed into vacuum bags!
As we unload the car in Chichester we thought we would never fit it all in, however Grace is like the Tardis and it all went in with space left for an essential 1000 Twinings Everyday teabags! AND I also found a spare 10 kg Bruce Anchor!
We spent the afternoon labelling the most obvious things with my new label maker, checking our next good dates to make Brighton and a trip out to Bognor Regis to find out what the big tent is you can see from the sea. It is Butlins!
Bognor really is a dive, no wonder George V told them to bugger it!
A label maker and vacuum bags!
The label maker to remind me about alway putting the engine in reverse when we are sailing to close the folding prop and which line controls the mainsail reefing. And of course once you start everything has to be labelled, even the pack of ship’s papers!
As for vacuum bags all my clothes are going in them to stay dry and fresh!
but for the Grace 