Party season 2013

Party season is in full swing and we’re burning our candle at both ends. You know you’ve had a good night out when you wake up the morning after, with a hazy recollection that you agreed to buy a Russian-built hydrofoil (thankfully, in this instance, subject to a few caveats).

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As usual during the closed season, we’ve been out and about by car and on foot. Typically visiting harbours and ports up and down the Firth of Forth, often travelling back to cruising venues in a forlorn attempt to rejuvenate our memories of the summer. The shot above is the lighthouse at the entrance to Anstruther on a crisp winter’s day.

At low tide on Boxing Day, we walked out along side the Dragon’s Teeth to Crammond Island. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for years, but any time we’ve had the opportunity the tide or weather hasn’t been aligned to our plans. The image above is from Crammond Island looking over towards Crammond and the mainland. Given that the island is East of the Forth Bridge, technically the trek there and back is along the bottom of the North Sea.

Reflecting on our truncated 2013 sailing season, there’s no doubt that the highlight was spending an hour with a pod of dolphins travelling East from Elie (read more here). Next year, we’re contemplating taking our Macwester Malin through to the River Clyde on the west coast of Scotland for a few weeks, but that’s far from a done deal. We have a lot of work to cram in before crane in, and my attention is turning towards how we’re going to get everything completed by early April.

Whatever your plans for 2014, I hope that you have an enjoyable and peaceful Hogmanay and a great start to the new year.

Dodging the gathering clouds

Our weekend’s sailing was slow to start as there was a lively weather front clearing through on Saturday. However I didn’t manage to avoid getting soaked, as I was drafted in as a last-minute crew member for the local dragon race. The forecast was better for Sunday and we arrived at our Macwester Malin before she was afloat, so that we could slip our mooring at the earliest possible opportunity. We had no plan other than to avoid the rain clouds, enjoy some carefree sailing, followed by a night at Capernaum Pier.

We tacked back and forth off Rosyth, Blackness Castle, Limekilns, and Charlestown in a gentle easterly. The very first shot above shows us on our 32ft centre-cockpit ketch with Charlestown in the background. Just above this block of text, is an on-board shot heading towards Limekilns, and below is a shot of us onboard our Malin with Grangemouth in the background. Thanks to John for photographs 1 & 3 from his yacht.

I’m not sure that I can explain just how good it felt to be sailing again, as this feeling was augmented with relief. 2013 has been a fantastic sailing season, yet we were hundreds of miles away for ten weeks missing most of it. Then when we eventually managed to get home and go for a mini cruise, the elements conspired against us and we spent most of the time stuck in the fog. We were beginning to feel that we weren’t going to get our sails up again before crane-out, so set against the backdrop of our predominantly yacht-less season, we had a totally fantastic day.

We arrived on the pontoon at Capernaum Pier just as a race was finishing. We met up with friends, and eventually made our way to the local pub to catch up on news, and hear about the race.

We woke up to a bright morning, so we quickly scoffed breakfast and got ready to go back out on to the river again. Just as we were setting off, we heard some stirring bagpipes and we both felt compelled to explore. If you like that sort of thing, it was great …and we happen to like that sort of thing.

Eventually our thoughts drifted back to sailing. The piper stopped playing and came down from the pier to see us cast off. It’s quite a tight spot to turn a 32 footer (see shot above the piper), so I used our bow thruster to swing our bow round about 120 degrees. As I was doing this, I couldn’t help but hear the owner of the Westerly Centaur moored just ahead of us say “I want one of those“, and then the piper shouted back over to her “Oh you need to get a bow thruster, they’re all the rage!”

By the time we left Capernaum Pier behind us, the weather was closing in. There was a filthy, black rain cloud consuming all in its path to the west over Grangemouth, and a similar black cloud to the east over the Forth Bridge. Where the sun broke though we were bathed in colourful light, and we reckoned that we must have been at the end of somebody’s rainbow.

Although we escaped the worst of the rain while we were out on the water, we were a bit damp around the edges. However we did make it back on to our mooring before a heavy downpour inevitably caught up with us.

Before too long, the rain cleared and we were left with a beautiful evening. The shot above is an attempt to capture the view we enjoyed over dinner in our cockpit. In case you’re wondering, the dark area occupying the top third of the photograph is the roof of our cockpit tent.

As the sun and tide dropped, we got our stuff together, locked up the boat and jumped into our dinghy. We weren’t quite ready to leave yet, so we went for a row out into the River Forth. It was a stunning end to a great couple of days.

Anstruther LWS cruise

After ten long yacht-less weeks in London, we were uber-keen to get back out on the water as soon as we could. We set a course for the marina at Anstruther, but given that the duration of the trip would be right on the edge of what was possible in one tide, we popped in for an overnight at Aberdour first. It was great to be back in our favourite east coast destination and we caught up with friendly faces that we hadn’t seen all summer.

That evening our rigging became the ‘perch of choice’ for the swarm of swallows that were resident in the harbour. We enjoyed watching their silent acrobatics as the tide fell and the day gave way to night. The next morning brought heavy fog, and it didn’t take an Apple Store Genius to deduce that the trip to Anstruther would need to wait for at least one more day.

Therefore a day later than expected we set sail for Anstruther. In a last-minute change to our plans, we slipped quietly out of Aberdour at 7.15 am on a falling tide rather than a rising afternoon tide. This would mean we would reach Anstruther at near LWS, but we set off anyway, as we were keen to make the journey while the fog had wandered off to bother somebody else.

As there was a light easterly wind, we decided to keep our Macwester Malin’s sails under wraps. About an hour into our journey, just as we started to cross Kirkcaldy Bay, our Garmin chartplotter lost all of it’s satellite signals. I veered substantially off-course to check if there was any change in position, but the screen was unresponsive. During the following five minutes we discussed turning back, as visibility wasn’t great. We could make out the coast to port side over towards Kirkcaldy, but had absolutely no visual of our destination. While the GPS was down, I used the diffused glow of the sun as a reference to steer, and have to confess that I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we were only five degrees off-course after the signal kicked back in.

We decided to press on. After crossing Kirkcaldy Bay, we needed to dump some time as we couldn’t enter Anstruther at low water, especially on one of the lowest tides of the year. We took a leisurely detour around the bay at Elie, before getting back on course to Anstruther.

Just as we were passing the lighthouse on the way out of Elie, ‘the crew’ nearly jumped out of her skin. She was speechless (not a trait I would normally associate with her), and could only point at the large disturbance in the water just off our stern. It looked a bit like we had strayed into a firing range. Moments later we realised that the large splash had been caused by a dolphin breaching alongside us, and that there was a pod of six or seven dolphins including a baby (see baby below).

The dolphins were going our way at around 2.5 knots and they accompanied us on our lazy journey for over an hour, meandering along passed St Monans to Pittenweem. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to video any of the dolphins breaching right alongside our Macwester on the three occasions that happened, but I did film them breaching further ahead of us half-a-dozen times, as can be seen in the video still below. It was a truly magical experience.

The dolphins eventually tired of playing with us, and all to soon they headed south. With the easterly wind picking up, it got a bit lumpy as we approached Anstruther, and we waited around for twenty minutes or so until we saw a fishing boat head into the outer harbour. We promptly followed it, and sat alongside the lighthouse for a further thirty minutes before heading into our berth on the pontoons.

High water came and went, and by 10pm it was approaching low water again. Our twin-keel Macwester Malin started to sink into the silt on the port side, leaning away from the finger pontoon. I courageously ventured out into Anstruther’s foggy Friday night chipmosphere, and did what I could with additional mooring warps. However, there was little could be done until we floated again the following day, and we spent an uncomfortable night listing to one side.

The fog we thought we had left behind, put in an appearance in the morning. Nonetheless we spent our days walking to Cellardyke and Pittenweem, and we also visited Crail by car courtesy of a visiting family member. We were grateful for the short periods of sunshine, but we also found the mellow tones of the fog horns to be strangely soothing. As we left the weekend behind, the fog stayed with us until it showed signs of clearing a little on the Tuesday. While we had the opportunity, we decided to head down to Port Edgar in time for East Coast Sailing Week which started two days later.

As luck would have it, there was a westerly wind blowing against us on the way back down …and as that wind was in-cahoots with the tide, the journey to Port Edgar took us five and a half hours. The marina was already very busy and we struggled to find a suitable vacant berth for the night.

The next morning I looked ahead at the deteriorating weather situation, and discovering that the marina was to get substantially busier, we chose to set sail the following night for Capernaum Pier at Limekilns (see above). In the end the bad weather didn’t arrive on schedule, but it did arrive …and (as I understand it) East Coast Sailing Week was cut short, as winds edged from F7 towards F8 on the last day. By then our 32ft Macwester Malin was safely back on her mooring.

Missing Malin back but bruised

According to the RYA Scotland Facebook page, a Macwester Malin went missing near Oban earlier in the summer. The yacht ‘Cristala’ was returned at the beginning of June, but she had suffered ‘significant damage’.

Further details on the RYA Scotland Facebook page here.

London calling

While the weather has been much better than expected in the UK this summer, unfortunately we’ve been hundred’s of miles away from our Macwester Malin since early June, and that’s left a gaping hole in our sailing season.

We’re no longer eager to be dazzled by the bright lights of big cities, so we spent most of our time trying to avoid the tourist hotspots. Predictably, we sucked-up every opportunity for a ‘boat fix’, whether that was religiously watching repeats of ‘Coast’ at 8pm on the ‘Yesterday’ television channel, a trailer-sailer parked in a drive way in Horsley, (yes, I’m referring to you ‘Moon Critter‘), or a disparate collection of boats huddled together on the edge of the Thames spotted from a great height on Google Earth.

Surrey Quays (pictured above) was a disappointment. Less of a marina and more of a floating shanty town. I am sorry if that sounds a bit harsh; absolutely no offence to the live aboard occupants there – I can see the attraction of living aboard in a big city such as London …however we were looking for boats that actually sail, and we didn’t travel half-way across the city to view what could be argued is affordable housing.

Our two trips to St Katharine’s Marina were much more fun. Amazingly on our first visit we spotted ‘Tide Head’, the Outbound 46 that berthed alongside us at Port Edgar in early August last year (currently up for sale at £300,000).

Trying not to dwell on the deep-fried delights we could have been ingesting at the ‘Fishcotheque’ over in Waterloo, we enjoyed less-calorific dim sum for lunch at ‘Ping Pong’ before going for one more circuit of the marina. Making our way around the docks we also spotted a Macwester Malin ketch hidden amongst a sea of larger yachts and motorboats (see below).

July and early August brought a heatwave to the UK, with temperatures up to 34 degrees in London. Inevitably we craved to be out on the water, but with no water-based craft to hand we just had to make the best of a bad situation. I shan’t go into detail about our trip to the boating ‘lake‘ at Dulwich Park …suffice to say that by the time I navigated around the pedalos and got into my stride, I had to stop and row back in the other direction. It was an epic fail of diminutive dimensions.

In the end we were away for ten long weeks, and as the weather was the best it’s been in recent years …it was really hard not to feel like we’ve missed out. Next up we’ll be back on the water as soon as possible, although now that we’re back the short-term forecast is looking pretty bleak. Who would have thought that?

Great Odin’s beard …it’s summer!

With good weather flirting with the forecasts and a busy time ashore over the coming weeks, we grabbed the opportunity to set sail on Thursday evening’s late tide. After a short overnight stop at Port Edgar, we were sailing again before 7am on Friday morning. It was a grey, moody, but soft start to the day and we had the river to ourselves.

Once clear of the bridges, with Hound Point to our starboard, we threw up some sails on our Macwester Malin ketch. This proved a bit pointless, as there simply wasn’t enough wind around. However we could see the promise of sunshine in the distance and our hopes of good weather for the weekend started building.

After a while we reluctantly brought our Macwester’s sails back down and motored on towards Braefoot Terminal (top left in photo above), The Haystack (top middle in photo above), and Inchcolm (top right in photo above). As we got closer, we conjured up far-fetched names for the green tanker that was alongside the terminal in the distance.

The sky brightened as the journey unfolded and by the time we reached Braefoot Terminal, we were beginning to think that the weather might even surpass the forecast. As for guessing the name of the tanker …we didn’t come close. [Handy user tip: If you click on the image above, you can just about make out Odin’s mythical goatee beard at the bow].

Approaching 8am just one or two nautical miles later, we reached Aberdour. By then the sun was beaming down on our home for the next couple of days. It was such a great feeling to be back.

We took things pretty easy for the rest of Friday, mainly catching up with friendly local club members that we hadn’t seen since last season. On Saturday we had visitors from the West coast onboard. Their young son brought a pirate flag with him especially for the occasion. He was keen to learn all about our 32ft centre-cockpit ketch and almost got the names of the sails from stern to bow nailed. It went something like this: …’Mizzen’ (correct), ‘Main’ (correct), ‘Chihuahua’ (umm …nearly, but not quite).

Although we offered our friends a bed for the night, they had to get back, so we enjoyed another peaceful night alone with only the crows, ducks and our pet heron for company. The next morning we woke up bright and early to another fine day, and after breakfast we were invited for a mid-morning cup of tea at an ABC member’s house on the beach. He had a fabulous home, and we learned that he typically walked his dinghy through the front garden, on to the beach and from there it was a short transfer out to his yacht in the bay. Late morning we walked  (in shorts and short-sleeves) a couple of miles East along the coast to a small harbour at Starleyburn. The harbour is privately owned and was locked up. From a distance, I spotted a couple of old boats on the hard, but there wasn’t an awful lot to see. It was an enjoyable walk nonetheless, and we had a relaxing late lunch with long chilled drinks on returning home to our Malin.

Like our long weekend, the weather didn’t last. On the journey back we tried to get our Macwester Malin’s sails up, but once again there was no wind. It wasn’t cold, but the cloud cover was dense and the sun was struggling to put in an appearance. The shot above shows Inchgarvie a small island near the Forth Bridge. Like many of the islands on the Forth (Inchkeith, Inchmickery etc), Inchgarvie was intentionally modelled to look like a battleship.

The weather improved as we neared the end of our journey. On the approach to our mooring, we met a friend from the club out on the water. We rafted up and slowly drifted down the river for a while as he told us of his week-long trip down to Lindisfarne and back. Sounds like a journey we’re going to have to make sometime.

Fife Regatta 2013

With a social event ashore on Friday night, it was after lunch on Saturday before we made it onboard our 32ft Macwester yacht and out on to the River Forth for our first proper sail of the season. It was great to finally reacquaint ourselves with our old friend ‘Dhu Craig’ (typically our first navigational marker) after a long winter apart.

We were both feeling a bit rusty, so even although the wind was behind us, we decided to throw in a couple of practice tacks back and forth across the river, as we meandered down towards the bridges and our final destination of Port Edgar marina at South Queensferry.

The river has become much busier on approach to Port Edgar since construction of the new Forth Replacement Crossing began last year. As usual, we dropped our Macwester Malin’s sails before we hit the construction zone, and we motored into the marina carefully avoiding the growing forest of buoys, barges, boats, and other obstacles.

Not long after we berthed, a friend from our club turned up in his Colvic Watson along with his friends in a Colvic Atlanta ketch. If you’re not familiar with either of those boats, the Colvic Atlanta (white over navy) is next to our Macwester Malin in the shot above, and the Colvic Watson is to the top right (on the far side of Maui 4, a Moody 44). It turns out that we had actually spotted this very Colvic Atlanta back in 2010 when we were looking for boats. At the time it was ashore near Blackness Castle in the owner’s back garden while it was being restored.

After dinner I eventually found some time to read the latest PBO, while ‘the crew’ was reading a novel on her Kindle Fire. I say ‘novel’, but I had absolutely no idea what she was actually reading, as the backside of a Kindle doesn’t give that info away to the rest of the world. After considering the circumstantial evidence and asking some subtle yet probing questions, I deduced that she must have been reading… “Stray shopping carts of  Eastern North America; A guide to field identification”.

Okay, okay. I’m joshing with you. I made that last bit up. Technically you can’t actually buy “Stray shopping carts of  Eastern North America; A guide to field identification” as a Kindle book at the moment …it’s only available as a hard back.

Anyhoo, before long some friends turned up and after a couple of drinks in our Macwester Malin’s spacious centre cockpit we headed over to the other side of the marina, where seven of us squeezed into a tiny 1968 Invicta’s cabin for a nightcap. Although uber-compact, it was fun nonetheless.

We had a great night’s sleep in our newly improved aft cabin, and after a healthy walk ashore in the morning followed by some lunch, we headed back out on to the water and set a course up river towards the Fife Regatta at Limekilns. I should perhaps point out that we were heading for the annual ‘Fife Regatta’ in Fife, rather than the more recent ‘Fife Regatta’ on the Clyde in a month or so. We weren’t racing (it’s not our bag), but we were keen to see what was going on. We motored into the wind until we cleared a tanker coming down river and then threw up our sails.

The race was in full swing by the time we got there. We dropped our sails and darted through the field in front of ‘Erin’, a 49ft Jeanneau with her spinnaker up. Once through the other side and clear of the race we got our genoa and main sail back up. By then the wind had dropped and so we kept our Malin’s mizzen under wraps as we didn’t think that it would give us much more momentum.

On the plus side, we were able to enjoy the tranquility as we weren’t rushing to make it into a distant harbour on a rapidly falling tide. Inevitably time eventually ran out, so we dropped our sails and headed back home. A friend from the club was onshore to welcome us in as we picked up our Hippo mooring buoy . After a short dinghy transfer, he was onboard and we exchanged details of our respective sailing weekend over chilled drinks. It was a pleasant way to finish off a relaxing weekend.

C-gull shakedown sail

It was a long wait, but we eventually made it out on to the water for a short shakedown sail. It was great to get out of the harbour, switch our engine off and get the sails up for the first time this season. We didn’t have long before dusk would fall on the Forth, however the weather had improved as the evening meandered along and we really enjoyed having the river to ourselves in the late evening sunshine.

With a neep tide meaning that we only had a short window to access our mooring, we weren’t technically sailing for very long, but it was long enough to check that everything appears to be in good order for our first cruise of the year the following weekend. As we reached a racing buoy that seemed relatively far away in the top picture, we grudgingly pulled our sails down and fired our Macwester’s diesel engine back up.

All too soon we were heading into towards our sheltered mooring. The shot above shows our white dinghy to the right of the yellow circle, then our Hippo SB1 mooring buoy, and to the left of that you can just about make out the speck that is our pick-up buoy. That speck is what I’m aiming our Macwester Malin’s bow for when we round the harbour wall.

Avoiding the other yachts in the harbour is usually straight forward assuming there’s no strong wind, but every now and then we have problems with dinghies that bob around on mini-moorings just off the harbour wall (out of shot to the left of the image above). This approach was very calm and uneventful …’uneventful’ is what I look for when we’re coming into our mooring.

With our 32 ft yacht safely parked and ready to ‘go’ come the first sign of decent weather, I turned my attention to a few outstanding tasks on our ‘nice-to-do’ list rather than our need-to-do’ list for a change. I recently decided that I wanted to infill the v-shaped berths in our Malin’s aft cabin, for the same reasons they’re infilled in the fore cabin.

Far from being a shipwright, I somehow managed to shape some Water & Boil Proof (WBP) ply to the required dimensions and surprisingly it fitted snuggly in situ on the first time of asking. I didn’t go to great lengths with the varnish finish, as this new fitting will spend it’s life hidden underneath a foam cushion.

Next on  my list was to fit two ZoomerRoo isolator switches to the batteries. The spec of the switch is around 400 amp continuous and 900 amp intermittent. I popped them on to test them, but want to reinstall them next time we’re on board …as I was short of time and feel that they could be better installed. Once in place permanently, the switches will ensure that everything that should be off when we leave the boat is actually off, and hopefully will mean that we don’t have to replace any more batteries in the near future.

Next up some actual cruising (we hope).

Subdued start to the new season

We’ve had a pretty subdued start to the season. The weather hasn’t been great in Scotland and yet we’ve watched, listened to, and read forecasts of hot sunny days further south in the UK. The fact that winter hasn’t fully retreated yet, arguably makes our ‘current‘ technical problem slightly easier to swallow. During one of the half-decent weekends that we had recently, we intended to head out for our shake-down sail. Unfortunately just before we were about to set-off our plans were scuppered when our Malin’s engine wouldn’t start.

Our Macwester’s Lombardini diesel engine is a reasonably recent replacement engine with low hours so we reasoned that a problem with the starter motor was unlikely. After a few simple diagnostics we were reasonably sure that the batteries were flat, so we took them home and I gave them a good charge. Both batteries appeared to maintain a healthy charge over several days. I was a tad confused as to why there should be a problem with either of the batteries, and given that I had nagging concerns about the Osculati main isolator switch (above, left switch), I bought an identical replacement and swapped these over. With the timely help of a passing friend, we managed to get the batteries back on board our yacht. I should perhaps mention that as the batteries are both half a metre long, I can’t tell you how happy I was to bump into the passing friend I mentioned, as I really hadn’t worked out how we were going to get the batteries from a bobbing dinghy back on to our Macwester Malin. Before long I had both fully charged batteries reconnected.

Unfortunately the engine still wouldn’t start. By this stage, we knew for sure that this was a battery problem as we had started the engine in the interim period with a car battery. Deciding to try to start the engine with one single battery, I persevered and after trying three combinations of the 2 x leads to 2 x battery terminals I got the engine started on the fourth and last combination. We decided to head to Capernaum where we would get easy pontoon access to fix the problem …whatever it was.

The short journey was completed without any problems, although the wind was gaining in strength and we were taken sideways as we entered the harbour. Of course we couldn’t rely on the bow thruster because of the battery problem, nonetheless we managed to get on to the pontoon easily given that there were friends ashore to take the ropes.

On Sunday the 5th of May the wind changed direction and with the tide well in, by midnight we were getting a bit of a bashing from a south-easterly (from the direction of 11 o’clock in the photo above), which was bring waves right into the harbour and pushing us against the pontoon. I got up and sat on watch for half an hour. Our Malin’s bow and stern were swinging up and down by anything up to 0.75 of a metre at times, but the centre of the yacht was relatively still and I reasoned that there was no danger that our new navy blue Majoni fenders were going to ride up over the pontoon as they’re 0.7m tall. Eventually I went back down into the aft cabin and managed to nod off despite the fairground ride and sound of the waves slapping firmly into our Mac’s hull.

The following day, while I was scratching my head and taking advice on the battery problem, I took advantage of being on the pontoon to do some smaller jobs. This included swapping out an old stanchion block, which was a bit sticky when we were operating the head sail, with a new Holt 450 block. Hopefully we’ll notice the difference when we eventually get out for our shake-down sail. At the same time, ‘the crew’ re-did some whipping on our new fenders, as she wasn’t happy with the first attempt.

With the help of a friend from the club, we discovered that one of the batteries dropped from over 12v to about 4v under load. The old battery didn’t go without a fight; later we discovered that it had chewed through my jeans and my hoody as I wrestled it off to the recycling centre. Our friend kindly sourced a replacement Yuasa Cargo battery with 143 Ah the following day and he even managed to swing a better deal than the £190 retail price for us [yay!]. With that, our Macwester Malin was fully operational once more. However we still had a small problem of some sort, as there was a spark when the leads were connected up to the batteries even although the isolator switch was off. This meant that there was something constantly drawing power from the batteries.

I reasoned that this problem was likely to be something that had been happening since we bought our Macwester 32 early in 2011, and that we had been able to sail throughout two seasons despite it. Nonetheless I decided that it made sense to keep going and try to identify the problem, rather than just live with it and assuming that everything would be okay as it had been previously.

This post is already overly-long so I’ll finish up now. As things stand, we’re fully operational. According to another friend (and electrician), it might be the bow thruster that is the source of the spark, or more accurately perhaps a sticky relay that sits between the batteries and the bow thruster. We’re still running diagnostic checks, however one solution might be to introduce a new standalone isolator switch for the bow thruster. We’ll keep going and we’ll find a solution over the coming week or two. The good news is that at this stage it looks as though there’s nothing that will stop us from going out for our shakedown sail come the next suitable day that we have free.

Whatever floats your boat

With a couple of good days forecast, we were keen to head out for a quick shake-down sail over the weekend. We planned to set-off straight away and then get our yacht’s genoa on alongside Capernaum Pier. It was a neap tide with only 4.4m at High Water [HW], so we knew that we had a very small window to escape our sheltered mooring. ‘The crew’ painted five stripes on a wooden post a couple of years ago, and we know through experience that anything below the bottom stripe means our twin-keel ketch is on the ground. As HW came and went our Macwester Malin 32 thought about floating, but her keels never quite made it clear of the mud. Best we can tell the high pressure must have kept the tide on the low side, so for my future reference anything less than 4.5m at HW is unlikely to be enough to float our boat if there’s also high pressure.

We decided to stay on-board and do some of the stuff that we needed to do. First up was getting the genoa on, which was a job made easier by a very gentle breeze coming from the South West straight on to our bow. After a spot of lunch the tide was receding and we decided to stay the night. I carried out some adjustments to the mooring when the water had finally ebbed away, and then the rest of the day disappeared well ahead of schedule.

Turning down an invitation to the local pub, we had a very quiet night on-board as our Malin failed to float when the tide came back in for another attempt just after 10pm. The next morning the view South to the river was bright and settled. Not sure what happened to one of the yachts further out; we reckoned that its rudder must have found a deep hole. I guess that’s one benefit of having a chunky skeg like our Macwester, as it doesn’t matter where you walk on deck when the tide’s out …she just isn’t prone to tipping over in any direction.

On the Sunday we spent a more leisurely day having accepted that we weren’t going sailing this time around. We nipped over to our yacht club and caught up on news about the day’s racing. I helped a friend carry out some remedial work to his mooring tackle following a screw-up which saw one of his rear strops being chewed-through by his rope cutter. Back on Indefatigable Banks, I read about a gas leak on-board a Macwester Malin called Sea Gilt in May 2013’s edition of Yachting Monthly …and that reminded me that I really need to get some sort of gas detection set-up organised sooner rather than later. After lunch we spotted some homing pigeons being released on the pier. They circled around two or three times before heading off beyond the trees.

With the arrival of some darker clouds we decided to call it a day. In the end, it didn’t take too long for us to drive through the rain and on our journey along the River Forth we spotted a steam engine meandering along the water’s edge. We gave it some beans and managed to make it to Culross in time to watch the train pass. The ‘Union of South Africa’ whistled, and her driver waved a rag at us as she steamed gracefully passed.

It was a welcome high point to finish our ‘low water’ weekend on.