Ocean Mist Ship's Log

23 rd to 25 th of June 2006 - West Mersea

Friday 23rd June

I drove down to Shotley meeting Andy who had been booked to instruct but was cancelled. This gave him some valuable fettling time. As usual had a nice meal in The Shipwreck and retired early to bed to catch an early morning tide southward.

Saturday 24th June

We locked out around 7am. We seemed to be the first of the Britannia boats out. It was raining and there was very little wind so we motored to West Mersea and I practised some navigation.We got to West Mersea around high water. Andy didn't seem convinced that it really is quite shallow, so we had an anxious half hour motoring up the channel to the pier. There really wasn't going to be enough water at low water, even if we could find a mooring buoy, which looked unlikely. Anyway we decided to leave the world of bilge and lifting keel boats and made for the deep water where we found a very green mooring buoy with good views of boats coming and going into West Mersea. I decided we were a bit far out to use the kayaks, so we called the launch and got a lift to land.

The weather had picked up and we walked around in the sun and had a fishy lunch in The Company Shed . We then returned to the boat for a snooze and a box of red wine.

Sunday 25th June

We had a late breakfast of bacon sarnies and then headed up toward Osea Island. We didn't quite get there as we needed to head home and this was going to be tacking. Fortunately we had good winds (Force 5), so the detours to keep us on sensible tacks were well worth it. We kept up with a boat motoring in a more direct route up the Essex coast past Clacton and made Harwich harbour shortly ahead of them. We managed to give the boat a quick clean and packed the kayaks onto the top of Andy's car and headed home tired.

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