Hamble to Weymouth

Paul, the persistent Maricom man arrived together with the PC builder man, two new PCs and a third spare (differently configured) hard drive on Thursday. The steely glint in his eye said that "this time, one of these boxes will work properly"!

Of course, it had to be the third option they tried out..... Windows 7 and Navnet 2 do not love each other at all despite advice from the Furuno and Maxsea folks to the contrary. However, a nice old XP build worked but still has a few anomalies. At least the hanging and rebooting game seems to have stopped though so the PC can be used with some degree of confidence again.

As it was a horrible wet and windy day, the captain decided upon a nice indoor job - genset valve clearance adjustment time. Here is the genset getting racy - going topless:

We left the Hamble nice and early on Friday and we saw the results of the powerboat crash that we mentioned in the last post. This rather bent thing is the cardinal buoy at the entrance to the Hamble river. Imagine how hard you hit a metal buoy to bend it like that:

Pottering down the Solent, we saw the lazy man's way to move your boat around the planet:

Of course, with the Nordhavn you can / are supposed to do all the trips you need on your own (or maybe that should say the boat's) bottom. The Solent was nice and quiet, no need to dodge the hundreds of yachts that infest the area at weekends. Passing Hurst Castle and then the Needles it felt good to be "underway" again.

The border force patrol boat passed suitably close to us as they overtook. Perhaps they were looking for illegal penguin passengers? Luckily, Patrick kept his head down for once:

Lulworth Range was not firing and so we could cut across the slightly bumpy St Albans ledge and then head straight for Weymouth. There, we had a serious welcoming committee. Firstly, Andrew (the Welsh one) arrived. Then Linda (the equally Welsh other half), Sarah (their daughter) and Dylan (Sarah's cute Welsh Terrier). Got all that critical information fixed in your brains?

Of course, Andrew, Linda and Sarah are also cute but somehow Dylan's picture is the one that made it into the blog.  Our social life then picked up another gear - a phone call from John and Kath (friends of Andrew and Linda who were also in Weymouth on their boat) inviting us to dinner. John cooks a mean risotto. He then dishes it up in anything but mean portions. We slept well afterwards....

Saturday was spent shopping, visiting Andrew and Linda's very smart new boat (here is a generic picture of one) that will get places at least 3 times faster than us:

We also had to prepare for the arrival of our new crew member - Anne. She was joining us for the planned next trip over to Guernsey, but more of that as / when it happens. In the meanwhile, here is a nice peaceful Weymouth harbour evening scene taken from the aft cockpit for you to enjoy / relax with: