Torquay to Kingswear

A nice calm morning meant it was foggy too. That kind of damp hanging in the air thing that had made the boat superstructure wet and was simply annoying. Not enough to wear wet weather gear for but enough to irritate. Despite that, as planned, we left the berth in Torquay pretty early in the morning to minimise the adverse tide that we would have faced later on. We wriggled out of the berth, headed around the inside of the breakwater and were very happy that our flybridge is well up in the air - a lower boat would not be able to see over the wall and the approach to the entrance would be totally blind. There must be some exciting moments there in high summer.

Once out into the murky stuff, we retired to the pilothouse, avoided the pot markers and had the radar working to help. Izzy seemed most concerned that the captain was not paying attention to all the navigation aids properly, sat on his lap and seemed most interested in the radar image:

Fortunately no warning barks were needed. 

The trip was pretty gloomy to start and end with. Here is how we saw Berry Head when there was a gap in the fog bank:

which is the first headland you pass on the short run south in this image of our track:

Normally we just love the entrance to Dartmouth, motoring between the two castles then seeing the town on the hill open up as you venture further into the river. This time, it was not quite as impressive:

but the fog had cleared enough for us to retire to the flybridge and pretend that it was all sunny and lovely:

The mooring gods were shining on us though, even if the sun was not. The nice man (Tony) at Darthaven Marina said that despite the fog, a couple of boats had moved from their little visitor area and that we could back into "pole position". We were rather happy about that. The fog slowly got burned off, the weather improved, the temperature was back to expectations and we took the little foot passenger ferry over to the town, getting a good view of the boat in her temporary home:

We had a rather nice Dale Nelson motorboat astern of us too although the crew were rather "standoffish". We were not wearing the regulation salmon pink trousers perhaps?

If you compare this image with earlier pictures of the boat, you can see how much lower were floating after a fuel top up. For the non boating folks - see how much / little green Coppercoat is showing above the water.

Maintenance news:

Nothing to report, sorry to disappoint you folks who love diesel and oil and coolant and spanners and skin off the knuckles stuff.