Canine invasion, posh Nordhavn 47 time and playing chauffeur

We were a bit tired after arrival in Haslar. The captain especially so thanks to the night time pot marker moment that the crew enjoyed. So, after a walk to the shops we were happy to have a chilled time on the flybridge with Anne, Izzy and Izzy's friend Barney:

Barney is a significantly larger cockapoo then Izzy, but she loves blondes so he is her buddy:

He thinks that he is a lapdog and loves attention. the only problem is that he is 18Kg or so and you really know when he sits or walks on you. After Anne left with Barney (she was looking after him for the day) we kept little Izzy and took her for a paddle as it was rather warm:

Back on the flybridge so that Izzy could dry off, we spotted the Hugo Boss racing yacht heading out to sea. No idea why - the Solent was going to be heaving with boats and at the speed they sail it must be like piloting a dodgem car. Here is a poor picture of the strange looking craft that we had berthed next to before, taken quickly from the flybridge:

On the subject of strange looking craft, the new Virgin liner "Scarlet Lady" returned to Portsmouth with much tooting and fanfare:

Liners seem to get uglier and uglier - or perhaps we are just very old and set in our ways. The Cunard stuff still looks much nicer. A floating Covid breeding ground at the moment? We feel much safer on our little Nordhavn. 

As the weekend weather was rather warm and sunny the boating madness of the south coast got worse. Here is the Marinetraffic AIS picture for Sunday lunchtime. Add in all the boats without AIS or with it turned off and you get an idea of how wild it was:

We didn't venture out into the carnage - instead we took Mr Toddler to his hospital appointment along nicely empty roads as everyone was either at the coast or enjoying their back garden on the hottest day of the year so far. We also popped into Ocean Village in Southampton to check on Malaspina:

Martin and Inge's lovely Nordhavn 47 lives there but thanks to Covid they have struggled to get over to the boat from Hong Kong recently. We just checked that all was well, ran the engines for them and admired how smart she is compared to our poor battered version. Living on board for many years does cause plenty of bumps and marks inside. It was also nice to see relatively empty lockers compared to our very full ones....

We did discover that they have a dying panel gauge so after conferring with Martin, we will pop back sometime to disconnect it. Might even take it away and try to fix it with a soldering iron and new capacitor if we are feeling extra kind / keen. We can probably afford the 20p or so that a new capacitor costs.