Escape from Swanwick into the madness of the Solent

You can have too much of a good thing. Swanwick is fine (albeit expensive) but the time had come to move on. We happily fired up the navigation gear to discover that the autopilot would not run the start up process properly and it ended up with a blank screen. Wonderful. You just do not hand-steer a Nordhavn for very long. We have two autopilot computers, linked to their own hydraulic pumps so the captain swapped the control head connection over to the second backup computer. Still the same issue. Then he disconnected the control head and follow-up lever on the flybridge - the system booted up happily. Mmmmmm. Exactly the same thing happened after the new cameras were fitted into the boat a few years ago. In exactly the same place. We detected a small pungent rodent....

So, we enjoyed the first flybridge trip of the year, a slow trundle down the Hamble river with Izzy who has joined us as additional crew sniffing the wind:

As it was a bank holiday Monday, leading into another bank holiday weekend thanks to the Coronation, we expected the area to be very busy and we were not disappointed:

It is quite a shock to be in the wildly busy Solent area again. It also reminded us of how many yotties don't know the rules of the road when they have their engine going. The "down from London" weekend lot were out in profusion and we were looking forward to them going home.

Expecting madly busy moorings everywhere, we had booked onto the Dan Bran pontoon in Lymington again. When we arrived, it was almost empty! Seems that folks did not book the week off to take advantage of the two bank holiday weekends. So, we enjoyed some lovely evening clouds and sun from the saloon:

The "fuzzy" picture through the right hand side is because the fly screen is parked there.

Izzy had a good time in the little park, chasing her ball with total focus:

The Toddlers came to visit for lunch, we had some good walks and an excellent evening with Ray and Sara in the Monkey Brewhouse. Most sociable and enjoyable. Lymington does start to look a lot less prosperous than before. Perhaps folks are being put off by things like this:

Not tempted to order a coffee for collection from them (and yes, the bags were smelly!)

Maintenance news:

After more judicious plugging and re-plugging of things, guess what. The autopilot failure was down to the flybridge follow-up lever, Exactly the issue we had after the camera fit. We put that initial problem down to a failed piece of hardware and swapped it out for a used spare lever that we had purchased a while ago as they are now rarer than hens' teeth. We contacted Paul from Maricom and told him the good news and that he had something to fix...