It looks as if we’ll be free to go cruising on Spring Fever from 4 July, the day the renewed easing of Covid-19 controls starts. While we will not be ready for early July, at least we can now plan a sail, possibly to the Essex and Suffolk rivers.
Following the end of the ban on overnight stays on boats, Cowes, where we are at the moment, has reopened to visiting boats that book a berth in advance.
Weymouth will have a booking system for visiting yachts two weeks ahead with no refunds or cancellations because of weather. Normally, in good summer weather, Weymouth visitors raft out up to 6 deep from the town quay but rafting will be banned to make social distancing easier and reduce visitor numbers. Cowes has adopted the same policy. Further afield, St Mary’s in the Scillies, which we visited last year, has just emailed urging us to visit again, so harbours and marinas seem keen to make up for lost revenue.
In case we go east this year, I checked Ramsgate, where we usually stop, and it is not requiring advance bookings. There are no restrictions other than closing half the showers so users are further apart. Ramsgate usually has plenty of room for visitors , especially if continental yachts on passage cannot show up because of quarantine. Our likeliest destination will be Woolverstone on the River Orwell in Suffolk, where the marina has confirmed that Spring Fever can have a visitor mooring.
There is still work to be done on the boat: three new seacocks have been commissioned and are yet to be finished; we will break the custom of a lifetime and pay someone to antifoul the boat to cut back on our travel to Cowes; and there’s a large amount of gear including sails to get there. Time, however, to think about booking a launch date.
We will still have to be exceptionally careful, because of extra vulnerability at our – umh – rather older than average age. We have even discussed paying someone to bring the boat over to a mainland harbour to avoid having to go on the Isle of Wight ferry in the summer. We can, however, stay in the car when crossing to load the gear, though that’s not much help when leaving for a cruise, because we cannot go by car unless we leave it there for weeks. These are problems we will solve.
At home, the new text for Pass Your Yachtmaster has been delivered to Adlard Coles. Researching it, I am more than ever convinced that it is a mistake to rely completely on electronics for navigation, and that having a portfolio of traditional and modern techniques will always be the sensible approach. I am now reading The Ultimate Navigation Manual by Lyle Brotherton, about land-based techniques, and he makes exactly the same point. The traditional skills involved are far more interesting and sophisticated than I had realised – he teaches desert and mountain navigation to the military among other roles – and he urges people not to over-rely on their GNSS at the expense of their knowledge of other methods.
tide by tide 