Getting wet, more heart in mouth and off to Lymington

After completing the various bits of maintenance we spent a couple of days helping Anne. She was still recovering herself when her husband Bob managed to come off a mountain bike and break his pelvis.... So, child minding, dog sitting (no hardship looking after Izzy at all) and chauffeuring the family to various hospital A & E departments at stupid times of the night / early morning. It was good to be useful even if Bob was still optimistic about buying a new mountain bike:

We reckon that Anne has other ideas.

Returning to the boat, we found that Roland the marmalade king had refitted the nice refurbished prop for us, so we can go and get it all fouled up again:

Relaunch was planned for 10am. That was an MDL 10 o'clock of course. they are in a BST+1:15 timezone it seems. Firstly we had to make sure that they had a berth for us (again, booked months ago) when we were back in the water. When the crew went to enquire, they had no real idea but finally told us we could use the slot recently vacated by the Nordhavn 76 that we had squeezed past when we arrived. No planning, no record of the booking, pure chance that they had a spot for us. Still wonder why we are so anti MDL?

The boat was dropped into the tiny dock area all OK:

After checking for leaks we backed out very gingerly and onto the allocated berth. Then we had to try and hose off 10 days of grot and grime from the hardstanding.

Roland came along to do the final engine alignment check, tighten the coupling bolts and to fit a new rope to the crane. In parallel, John, Irene and Archie (the achingly cute Lakeland terrier that you've met before) had arrived in the area and came to join us on board ready for a little cruising. Their arrival by bike was noteworthy, mainly for Archie's way of hitching a lift:

We took the Defender off to his summer home, returned by train (on time too!) and then prepared to escape. We were a little concerned that the Hamble Point marina lift had slightly reconfigured our boat when we saw this picture:

Look closely at the name on the less than pretty hire boat in the foreground. It should stay on the Norfolk Broads and not venture out to sea we reckon.

Predictably, we didn't leave at our planned time (Roland had things to finish off as he was being dragged from pillar to post on various jobs) but we did manage to catch the tide to get help all the way down to Lymington where we were pinned against the Dan Bran pontoon by unseasonable winds that were stronger than usual and from a direction 180 degrees away from the norm.