My God! It Actually Floats

Well the day finally arrived and Missy Moto got put in the water but not without some antics of which read on.

Our little Coromandel, Missy Moto, has been primped and polished, but regardless has been sitting on her trailer in a yard full of assorted caravans, boats and motorhomes waiting endlessly, or so it seems, to return to the sea and her true purpose. 

Lambs To The Slaughter

In the interim Missy has had a solar panel fitted to top up the on board battery, had some of the wiring tidied up, the engine dropped in and a new fuel tank but mostly she has just sat on her trailer staring forlornly at the cattle in the field next to her probably wondering when, if ever, she would re-visit her old marine haunts.

We had intended to launch her at the end of April to maximise our usage in this the Queen's Jubilee year, but the vagaries of the Great British weather have dictated regular judicious postponements. For one thing three novices launching a boat into the teeth of a south-easterly gale in Swanage Bay was deemed foolhardy in the extreme. For another, though the mooring was laid in June last year, I had not stirred my aged stumps enough to go and locate it. When I did finally canoe out and pinpoint its location, amazingly enough right on its GPS position, it had disappeared three days later when the mooring service company came to lift and inspect it. It was definitely there on the Monday because I saw it and photographed it, if only to stem the gentle ribbing of my co-owners about buying a mooring sight unseen, but by Thursday when it was due to be inspected it had disappeared. So another delay is incurred while the local divers locate and lift it about a day too late as it happens.

See There It Is!

The year of Our Lord 2012 has seen the weather system go completely off the reservation and throw weather front after weather front onto the South Coast like rubble onto a skip. After a brief hopeful sunny interlude in March we have had pretty much continuous rain and gales so the launch has been put back numerous times and I sense a slight air of discontent in the ranks and mutiny brewing, Mr Christian. Finally we decide that we can wait no longer and, as a brief weather window appears, Friday 6 July is the target date. Dave arrives on Wednesday and Thursday dawns bright and sunny and remains that way all day. The forecast is good for the Friday but, as is so often the case, the forecast is wrong. Friday is overcast and there are ominous clouds glowering over Swanage but John is on his way from Wellow and we're not going to have another postponement. Undaunted, well slightly daunted, we tow Missy off the wall she's been snuggled under for the last nine months and head for Swanage slipway.

Now, we've had significant discussions about whether it was better to hoist her into the water which would involve a ten mile road trip to Ridge near Wareham or just to risk the sight of three landlubbers being towed down the slip by a runaway boat and trailer gambolling towards the water like a newly released cow onto fresh pasture. In the event and after exhaustive soul searching and pestering every known local to the point of insanity for information, we have plumped for the Swanage slipway so it is to there that we repair with everything but the kitchen sink.

It was carefully planned to park boat and trailer well out of the way in order to dress and step the mast but, as we arrive, a Swanage refuse collection lorry follows us impatiently into the boat park and we end up parking in the RNLI spot strictly reserved for the crew of the local lifeboat. Things are not off to a good start.

The mast stepping and attendant rope charming capers proceed with as much speed as we can muster acutely aware that the lifeboat crew, not renowned for their tolerant patience, may arrive at any moment. And it has started to rain.

Finally we're ready to roll and one advantage of the steady precipitation becomes immediately apparent. Normally the local angling club, whose club house is next to the slip, would be lined up for the sport of watching three tyros launching. It's usually a bit of a pantomime and what passes for entertainment for the anglers. I guess when your 'sport' is watching a little red float bobbing on the surface of the water 90% of the time the frolics of people like us must be the equivalent of the Roman games in the Colisseum.

Missy Is About To Start Stargazing.

The rain has kept them away so we get to fuck up in relative privacy. Not that we fuck up...much. There is one slightly heart stopping moment when Missy is first unhitched and we realise that the trailer, now loaded, is tail heavy. The first sign of this is that the tow hitch begins to travel skywards not rapidly but inexorably. Luckily Dave's been here before and he quickly hangs onto the hitch allowing John and I to get our combined weights onto the trailer while Dave undoes the travelling straps. Missy slides gracefully into the water and the trailer is returned to the boat park, the tender is inflated, Missy's engine is started (it's raining steadily and completely windless) and we chug out toward the mooring.

We reach the mooring ( not ours you understand which is still at the bottom of the bay but No.15 which, I'm reliably informed is vacant and we can use pro tem ) tie up to it after some faffing about on my part and, since it's still raining and we're all getting cold we decide to head the tender back to Buck Shore and some warm food. Unable to start the small Suzuki, Dave & John paddle doggedly back the five or six hundred yards to the shore against wind and tide, where, on lifting the small outboard, Dave discovers a fuel tap on its port side. Turning this on and pulling the cord he is rewarded by the little motor spluttering into life! We have all been there but since he is our guru for all things mechanical we are slightly concerned for the future of this escapade!

Still, she's in the water, everything works and the following morning there was no sign that she might be sinking so all's well with the world. She does look incredibly small though!

Postscript: On arriving home there is a voicemail from Divers Down to say they have raised our mooring. Oh! It must have been the one we passed on our way to number 15. As I say, everything went without a hitch.

Procrastination Rules

In September, as new boat owners, Dave and I mooched round the Southampton Boat Show looking for ways not to spend money. This, as it turns out, is practically impossible since one can spend anything from a few pounds to multiple millions depending on your bank balance. Our combined overdrafts just about permit us to have a sandwich and even that was stretching the budget some. I did manage to get a Garmin Montana 600 handheld satnav which, as well as being very portable is also waterproof and has an NMEA connection facility so it will read out to the cockpit making navigation easier. I got it for under £400 and since it'll double up for use in the canoe and is my own purchase it didn't need a pow-wow.

Perhaps We Could Add A Balcony To A Coromandel?

Having got Missy Moto to Swanage and found a spot close by to park her on the trailer we decided to launch her in mid to late September, for the last few weeks of the season to try our meagre skills and see if she floats - it's by no means certain! This was a cue for the peculiar British weather to blow it's proverbials off for the best part of three weeks thus knocking firmly on the head any thought of three novices putting to sea in an unknown hull with an unknown engine and a strange rig so we decided to park her up for the winter. Whilst disappointing, this meant that we had some more time to fit a bilge pump and make sure the electrics were working.

She's parked on a farm site nearby (5 minutes walk) and, once tarpaulined up, is looking quite snug. Of course it didn't last. The indomitable wind got up on its hind legs, rubbed the flimsy tarp over anything sharper than a billiard ball and wore nicely aerodynamic holes all over it so a new more substantial one will be the order of the day end of season. Ho hum, the learning curve continues.

Missy Goes On Safari

On the up side, I had been perusing engine makes and types to replace the two-stroke antique she arrived with and had arrived at one of two options. The ever-reliable but expensive Honda four stroke or a Tohatsu 6hp sail-drive model which seemed much cheaper but stil had a very good reputation. The Tohatsu brought the price down to a more modest £1300 (Hondas were up around the £2k mark) which would still have to wait. Then, one rainy day, browsing the marine section of eBay, what should peep over the parapet but the very same Tohatsu 6hp four stroke, six months old and only in Salisbury a mere 40 miles away. I bid expecting to get it for around £900 which would be good but in the event the 'hammer' fell at under £500, 490 to be precise, and to cap it all the engine is in Westbourne, less than 10 miles as the crow flies. What a result! Again I've bought without full consultation but Dave and I pick up the engine and hear it run sweet as a nut so there are no major objections from the stalls.

This was all at the tail end of 2011 and it's now mid-February 2012. We're eagerly anticipating a launch mid-April to mid-May and just need to fit the bilge pump and check the electrics. I'd firmly resolved to attend to the head lining and some other small cosmetic stuff but the road to hell and all that, so none of this is done and Missy Moto has been tucked away under her deteriorating tarpaulin waiting for our tender attentions in the early Spring which is almost here.

Unable to locate the mooring buoy, despite having paid for it and it's attendant ground tackle, I have obtained a set of GPS coordinates for it and, on a fine day with no ice on the water fully intend to take out the new satnav (Garmin Montana 600) in the canoe and pinpoint it so we don't lose it! Always assuming it's there in the first place. Dave has not been slow in pointing out that buying an unseen mooring from a guy 'down the club' is probably not my wisest move to date. It's not quite as bad as it sounds though but I can see his point.

And so it goes...

Scotty (Dave) Can Hold Her, Captain

It's now a week since I headed home from the sunny Midlands to the equally sunny south coast where the Swanage Carnival has been wreaking it's annual shake-up of the usually sleepy little town. Not that Swanage is dead by any means. It has a vibrant musical life with two Blues Festivals, a Folk Festival, two Comedy festivals and numerous other entertainments year round. It's just that every year at the end of July and beginning of August the whole town and it's visiting tourists go batshit crazy and behave in a most un-English fashion. The whole thing is kicked off by a carnival procession involving any exhibitionist that cares to brave the Isle of Purbeck traffic and plonk themselves down in Swanage. So this year there were motorcyclists in fancy dress (a peculiar mixture of Ghost Rider lookalikes, people in cowboy gear, a white rabbit and Wallace & Grommit and not a helmet in sight.) Dune buggys (remember them?) where the nearest dunes (Stusland Bay)are protected by the vigilance of the National Trust, dunes buggys are not just frowned upon but would probably be the centre of a ceremonial pyre and danced around by naked National Trust folk painted to match their surroundings. Carnival floats representing many local organisations some exceedingly strange, town criers, folk dressed as pirates, the Flintstones and, last but far from least, a group of what looks like professional carnival performers from Luton, whose gayly coloured and incredible costumes would look amazing in bright sunlight but only achieve a kind of nervous giggle on the overcast Swanage Sunday that it is. Which is a shame because the full splendour of their garb would blossom in the kind of sunshine that the town has been bathed in for the last 3 weeks. Still this is England after all and too much gaiety is frowned on and has been since that warty bastard Cromwell inflicted his particularly dour brand of religion on us.

Just Add Sun - Some Hopes

Be that as it may I'm back in Swanage and waste no time in finding out about launching facilities, costs, tidal options and the general geography of the launch slip. Which all seems pretty tame stuff given that Dave is beavering away big time and has fabricated the stainless steel bracket to protect the bow and anchor and sent it off to be welded, removed and replaced the rubbing strake which, held only by a pop rivet, had pulled away from the hull. It is now fixed with a sturdy stainless bolt which probably means the rest of the boat will fall apart to leave one proud rubbing strake and the bolt behind. He's stripped, cleaned, oiled, WD40d the engine which to his surprise fired on the second pull of the cord, painted the trailer with Hammerite. Released the seized on trailer brakes including the tow bar brake mechanism which had also seized, sorted the anchor well and numerous other small and not-so-small tasks that required attention.

We've identified the engine as Yamaha 5hp air cooled single cylinder outboard built somewhere between 1973 & 1980 which means it's elderly, probably noisy and perhaps slightly unreliable but it'll do for now and we'll consider our options during the winter layup months when some other tasks will have to be addressed.
More anon.

In Which Our Heroes Meet For The First Time

The time has come to put plans into action, antifouling paint on bottoms,shoulders to wheels, noses to grindstones(ouch) etc. etc. Heading northwards with the fabulously expensive antifouling paint and an armed escort I arrived late on a Monday morning enthusiasm bursting from my elderly seams and raring to attack a list of jobs as long as the proverbial arm. Problem number one arose even before I reached Dave's house. I had forgotten my carefully crafted list of things to check on the boat. This seems par for the course for the pre-Alzheimer's generation so, undaunted and after a swift cup coffee we began to inspect Missy Moto and her mysterious contents.

The first thing I found on going below decks was a wine glass, glass mind you, not plastic, standing proudly on the table undisturbed by it's fifty mile trailer trip from Lydney. We both hope this augurs well for smooth sailing in the future. Further unloading revealed a veritable treasure trove of odds and sods the function of most of which was immediately obvious - life jackets, man-overboard kit, anchors(two), a gas cylinder (sitting on some foul smelling water in a dedicated spot in the aft port locker), a fuel tank (seen better days) and all the usual bits and pieces associated with boats and boating. The kitchen equipment, including various condiments of somewhat indeterminate age, was all taken out and the lockers, drawers, nooks and crannies were all vacuumed in a masculine sort of way i.e. not very well but, hey, it's the thought that counts init?
Meanwhile Dave is T-cutting the hull sections that are original gel coat and inspecting the lower parts of the hull which are due to be anti-fouled shortly. We have contacted John, who is on a short break in Gloucestershire reminding him a) that he hasn't yet set eyes on his third of the purchase and b) that we've drawn lots and he lost and has to T-cut the white bits and that he should get his arse up here and view the vessel. Like all of us John has other calls on his time and is feeling knackered after a glitch in his daily grind which has already delayed his departure but he promises to put in an appearance on Wednesday if only to see what his money's been spent on. Meanwhile Dave and I, having given a reasonable facsimile of two men hard at work finish our evening with a well-deserved Italian meal in the salubrious surrounds of Malvern. And so to bed.

Tuesday sees yet more scrubbing and scraping and general tidying up and at no point have we detected anything horrendous on this beautiful little boat. There are jobs to be done without a doubt but nothing insurmountable. Luckily Dave is a master at fabrication, mechanics and all that is practical so the reinforcement of the bow section which has had some struggles, presumably with a relentless tide or wave action, and is in need of attention before we moor in Swanage Bay, can be left in his expert hands. We end Tuesday with a barbecue and significant quantities of alcohol which ensures deep sleep.
Wednesday and the foul anti-fouling can be put off no longer. I don coveralls and not much else, latex gloves and attack the hull having masked down to the waterline. As always I initially load the brush with far too much liquid gold and splatter copious quantities over anything in close proximity but eventually get the hang of it and, surprisingly, the job progresses hitch free for the most part. There's a fresh breeze, no rain and intermittent cloud so perfect weather for the job. John & Penny arrive in the late morning and, after the guided tour, John gets stuck in to his white bit with determination and persistence.

Dave's Used Car Lot

There are now three motorhomes, a tiger-striped pick-up truck, a car and a boat on Dave's drive and it's looking more like a used car lot than a residential home. We had already been offered a price for a Land Rover that had been parked there temporarily on Tuesday so this opinion is not just fanciful. I finally finish the anti-fouling about mid-afternoon and Dave and I decide to try and figure the arcane business of rigging the junk rig but on the ground first before we attempt it on the water. Lucky we did because it proves more difficult than it looks which you'd hardly think possible but we're viewing the floating attempt with some trepidation. No doubt we'll survive! Having fiddled impressively with the rig, we roll it up again and somehow squeeze it into Ulrica, the green goddess, so I can transport it to Swanage in style and lighten Dave's not inconsiderable load when he tows the boat southwards. Everything is loaded up and all three of us are ready for an early start on Thursday morning - well as early a start as three sexagenarians are ever likely to make.

Titanic Impression - Dave As Kate Winslet

Thursday morning and all three of us head in our respective directions having gone about two thirds of the way towards the launch.
It's all looking frighteningly good. It can't last. Can it?

Pretty Tough, Ain't She

Progress Progresses Progressively

So the boat has been dragged kicking and screaming from it's nice warm haven in Lydney Harbour and towed to Dave's home near Malvern almost without incident. This is not to say that there was not a deal of gentle persuasion with judicious use of WD40 and some lump hammer semaphore which finally persuaded the brakes that there was, in fact, two states of being, on and off. Once this had been established, Dave being something of a machine whisperer, and the wheel bearings inspected for signs of impending disintegration, Missy Moto was hitched up to Pete's Land Rover Discovery and hauled reluctantly to the tidal streams of the Malvern Hills with two sets of ears akimbo for sounds of metal or worse grinding off tarmac. As it turned out boat and trailer behaved impeccably and our purchase is now Dave's latest in a long line of inappropriate garden decoration which his long-suffering wife, Pat, simply accepts with a resigned shrug. (No doubt she has some serious shopping penance in store for him when he least expects it).

Now it begins. The endless list making. The discovery of dire inadequacies of seaworthiness. The dreams of installing navigation equipment worth more than we paid for the boat. The cat's cradle of the rigging which seems to involve thousands of metres of rope of varying thicknesses, lengths and braids in fact the only uniform thing about all this string is the expense of it.

We need some antifouling. Our experienced sailing friend who is well-connected to scientific boffins who've done the research on this stuff advises us to use Compound A. Off I trot to a Poole based chandlers who, when I mention Compound A, gives vent to the longest, sharpest intake of breath I've heard since one of my uncle's farm tractor got a not-so-slow puncture in a tyre, you know, one of the big knobbly one on the back wheels. 'It's veeery expensive. How much do you need?' '2.5 - 3 litres,' says I all innocence and ignorance. 'That'll be £200,' he says. 'What! I only want to anitfoul it, not gild it. Isn't there anything cheaper.' 'Of course there is. This is £90 for 2.5l and this £70 for 3l but I wouldn't recommend it.'

So off I trudge, ninety quid lighter and beginning to realise that the old adage about a hole in the water surround by GRP into which you pour money is all too accurate except that the actual saying involves being surrounded by wood in which case you'll need all the resources of the Federal Reserve but they seem to be broke now too, so maybe George Bush owns a boat.

I have also acquired a tender, spotted for me by a neighbour whose hobby seems to be dumpster diving or whatever is the British equivalent. This he persuaded me was 'a good buy' and would probably be cheap which indeed it did turn out to be though not quite as cheap as I'd hoped. He's promised to repair the mild damage to the engine mount and so he joins the long line of people seemingly put on the planet to make me look inadequate and yes, it is all about me!

We now have a) a boat, b) a mooring and c) a tender plus engine(another of Stig's acquisitions from the aforementioned dump - it's astonishing what people throw away) It's all shaping up rather well.

Meanwhile John hasn't even seen what he's sinking his money into, I have had only the briefest of glances at the little beast and Dave is sitting on our investment wondering where and when to start the Augean stable thing. Ho hum and all's well with the world.
Watch this space, it's surrounded by water.

Why Junk?

'The subtlety of the Chinese junk rig is hard to convey; to be appreciated it has to be experienced, to be lived with, and at length. Enlightenment advances slowly. It is a process of gradual and piecemeal absorption. To an extent it starts, for the occidental, as an act of faith. Too many built-in, scarcely recognised prejudices militate against easy acceptance. Without acceptance, understanding is not possible. The western sailor is, in the main, too impatient. His leaning is for the quick and the obvious. He wants results, and now. Peremptory rejection, scornful dismissal, delivered in double-quick time, is the usual verdict on this most elegant of rigs.

Born of two millennia of infinitely patient trial, error and sinuous inventiveness, graced with a score of tiny details whose relevance hover, like Columbus' egg, just the other side of comprehension until the penny drops with an obvious and embarrassing clunk, infinitely forgiving to mast and sail and hull, supremly easy to manage, the junk rig is a perfect manifestation of the oriental genius. It expresses as well as anything the salient characteristics of the eastern worldview. It is a non-confrontational rig, soft, relenting. It absorbs rather than resists. It turns the other cheek, feinting gently away, while calmly appropriating the forces directed against it. It advances quietly, without thrash or bang. It sets up no strains on the hull it drives. The mast wants to fly, to rise up through the partners and take to the air, rather than drive itself through the keel below; it yields to the wind, curving gently, the pressure of the sail ranged evenly along its height through the regular spacing of the battens and parrels. The sail delivers its power at the slightest of angles to the breeze, its fan-like configuration ready to be closed up in a second or two when reefing is called for. No junk-rigged craft need ever be forced on its ear. The sailing is upright, sedate, unstressed. It strives for a simple non-aggressive harmony with wind and wave.

The contrast with the bar-taut, hard-edged and, until recently, cumbersome rigs of the West is as good a metaphor as any for the great divide between the eastern and the western psyche. The modern occidental rig seems to set itself up in opposition to natural forces. It attacks them, brutally. Its aim is to overcome them rather than to work with them. The principle is to create even stronger materials then stress them to the limit in a triumph of myopic engineering machismo. It is a hotbed of high tension. Every bit of kit is wound up to within a fraction of its breaking point. Everywhere winches, levers, turnbuckles and multi-blocked tackles are ratcheted up to deliver tons of opposing tensile and compressive forces on mast and hull. This is the finest and dandyest of set-ups, go-fast and gung-ho, until a shroud or a swage or a thread or a rivet or a humble pin gives up the ghost and the whole edifice comes tumbling down in a mess of alloy and astonishment.

The aerodynamics of the junk rig are still poorly understoof. Advanced scientific analysis, wind tunnels and all, has not yet come up with a definitve theory as to exactly how it works. The rig seems to defy comprehension. Forget smooth air flow. The disturbances and vortices set up by the battens seem to be a positive attribute. The saggy luffs so hated by the western sailor seem to enhance performance. Eveything is arse-about, counter-intuitive, typically bloody foreign.

No sail is easier to cut and more forgiving of its material than the junk sail. The cloth, and it can be virtually anything you like, even old hessian sacking if that's all you've got, is simply laid out flat and cut to size. No fancy cambers or curved seams are necessary. The sail-maker's skill is redundant. Any Tom, Dick or Ha Jin adept with a sewing machine or a needle and thread can knock up a sail between breakfast-time and the happy hour. Once made the sail will last and last. Minming's main sail, as we left the Faroes astern, was in its twenty-seventh year. Supported at every point by close spaced battens and their multipartite sheeting, the material is seldom stressed. It never flogs. Holes and patches have little adverse affect on performance.

The sail battens are traditionally made of bamboo or tree branches. Just cut to size however many lengths you need and hey presto! A few spares are usually carried on board in case of breakage. In the West the repertoire of materials used has inevitably expanded to include aluminium, plastic, fibreglass. No doubt somebody somewhere is using carbon fibre or kevler or whatever is the latest space-age compund. Each material has its ardent advocates and its indignant detractors; each has its good points and its not-so-good points. In the arcane world of junk rig specialism the debates and arguments and experimentation continue year after year, with little sign of agreement or resolution.' (More Voyages of a Simple Sailor: Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing - Roger D Taylor. Fitzroy Press 2010)

I reproduce this short passage from Roger Taylor's amazing book because it encapsulates perfectly what is so attractive about the junk rig and why it holds so many cruising sailors under its spell. It is a supremely efficient rig that is very easy to manage which makes it more idiot proof than most for an trio of cruising tyros. Time will, no doubt, tell.

To Begin at the Beginning

Q. Why do three men wish to buy a boat? Why do three men wish to buy a junk-rigged boat? What do these three men know about sailing a junk-rigged boat?

A. Dunno. Dunno. Nothing.

Great start.

Let's begin at the beginning. I have had a fascination for the junk rig for some years. Don't ask me why but my interest was sparked by an ex-naval commander who once told me that the junk rig was the most efficient, easiest to sail and cheapest to maintain rig ever developed. Further reading suggested that, not only was he right but that there was a small but significant group of junk rig nuts worldwide, some of whom made their own sails, some of whom had circumnavigated the globe and made other scary voyages under the said rig and a couple of whom had even done super-duper boffin type studies at university to explain how this bag of wind propelled vessels of varying size and tonnage on long, long ocean voyages. They had degrees and everything.

Junk rig supporters are a slightly eccentric bunch who shrug off the derision of their Bermudan rigged brethren to sail in a reportedly more relaxed fashion utilising a sail design that has been used in the far east for many centuries on both coastal and ocean going cargo ships. It's combination of simplicity, comparative cheapness, ease of maintenance and repair has ensured it's survival despite new developments in high tech sail materials and rigging. In short, it seems to be a criminally overlooked, tried and tested mode of propulsion and ideal for simple relaxed cruising.

My own interest was put on hold while I lived in the middle of the country where puddle sailing was the order of the day. On moving nearer to the coast in Dorset I made some initial enquiries but had another brief hiccough when illness intervened curtailing sailing ambitions.

Illness banished by the combined forces of the NHS and supportive CAM I returned to thinking about cruising the Jurassic coast and what craft would fit the bill for such a pastime. Lo and behold, springing as if called forth from the universal lucky bag, came Missy Moto.

As it turned out MM was a Newbridge Coromandel sail number 17 and was currently languishing in Lydney on the River Severn in Glouscestershire.

The Coromandel was a junk rigged version of the famous Corribee the boat in which Ellen McArthur circumnavigated the UK whilst she was still a foetus. The hull is therefore a proven and seaworthy design onto which Newbridge grafted a junk rig to make an unusual sailing boat of manageable proportions with the required rig. To cap it all, Newbridge Boats, although now no more, were built in Dorset so Missy Moto would be returning to her birthplace or thereabouts.
Mentioning my mild obsession to my other half's cousin, also a sailor, I somewhat dragooned him in to going halves with the boat if she should prove suitable (I hadn't even seen her at this stage). The germ of an idea was growing nicely.

We intended to have a short touring holiday in North Wales in June 2011 and went via Lydney Harbour where the Lydney Yacht Club were having their open day and MM's current owner was doing a sterling job cooking for the assembled club members and visitors. We camped in their car park for the night being entertained by watching arriving boats navigate the horrendous tidal flow of the Severn and, as they shot across it into the safety of the harbour, receiving rounds of applause varying in intensity according to how hairy the entrance was. I figured if MM could survive here then she must be some little boat. We had a brief squint at the little craft but it was raining, Paul (the owner) was busy and I had no clue what to look for having never bought or thought about a boat bigger than a sailing dinghy so it was a slightly off-putting experience made even more so by my sneaky other half not putting up any resistance so devolving the whole responsibility to me knowing as she did so that this would cause me to have serious second thoughts. She was right.

We spent an interesting ten days or so on the Llynn Peninsula and returned via Lydney Harbour again mainly as an overnight stop and to have one last look at MM before I reluctantly shelved thoughts of Jurassic Coastal cruising.

Shortly after we arrived back in Swanage some chiropractor friends visited and John suggested he come into the MM partnership to which I agreed with alacrity. We now had three members to spread the cost between. I have subsequently realised that that was not really my decision to make and that Dave should have been consulted but democracy is not my strong point something that's going to have to change I suspect.

When I had arrived back in Swanage I realised that, although I have sailed various dinghies and windsurfing equipment for over 40 years, I knew absolutely nothing about cruising sailing and the general mechanics of how it all worked and I determined to find out about moorings, winter lay-ups and all the attendant gubbins attached to boat ownership. As a preliminary foray into this I quizzed some Swanage Sailing Club members about moorings and their availability etc. How did one go about getting one, how much did they cost, how did one maintain them. Just by chance, I was told, there was one available (in fact they were just about to lay it that very day), it was first come first served and it was within budget. 'I'll have it', I heard myself say. Now we had a mooring but no boat.

So there we were, Tony(me), Dave and John proud owners of a mooring but no boat so, since John, already shirking his responsibilities, was going on holiday, Dave and I agreed to meet in Lydney together with a friend with extensive boating experience to check out MM with a view to purchase. (John's involvement had lowered the risk significantly and meant that this really was a no-brainer much to Lynda's chagrin - the 'resist by not resisting' strategy had clearly failed this time.) Dave is an engineer as is Tim, our nautically experienced oppo, so they fine-toothed the little boat, we examined the sails, battens, yard, boom and finally the trailer. Finding nothing amiss we made an offer and got a massive £100 off the asking price. We now owned a boat.

All we have to do now is to get her to Dave's so he can make some reinforcing for the anchor roller and take stock of her general condition and make three lists 1.Things to do immediately. 2.Things to do this winter. 3.Things we'd like to do but can't afford. Simples.