Passage to Woodbridge

An uneventful trip.

Left the marina at 7:30 and got the mainsail up almost as soon we we left the Ipswich Wet Dock lock. We got a little help from it as soon as we were past the Orwell bridge, so we got the staysail and jib up too, but we mainly motored down to Pin Mill. We need to keep our speed up at 4 knots to make the tide window over the Deben Bar. We could not make it under pure sail but motor sailing worked really well - the forward motion shifted the apparent wind so we could point down the river and put in a series of long tacks. We did switch to pure sail after passing Levington Creek, but gave up trying to tack around Colimer and motored to Landguard and then across the big ships channel.

We had left in the first lock out, and motor sailed to keep up our speed, but once across the Big Ship Channel we turned off the engine and ran along the coast. We could see the larger and faster boats coming up behind us so we raised our top sail to try to keep ahead.

The fleet converged on the West Knoll buoy in an amazing way! It seemed like every boat on the East Coast - not just the gaffers - were coming in at once! We took our topsail down before going onto a run to pass West Knoll, and came past East Knoll with Random right behind us, a big plastic boat to port and Nancy Blackett on the starboard beam. It felt like there were inches between us.

We nearly got washed down onto the Deben buoy but Alison touched the engine and pushed us past it.

We had a perfect run up the Deben with the last of the tide and dropped the Main sail in Granary Reach before going practically into the Tidemill on staysail alone.