Bored with Brighton

As my sister remarked on FaceBook, if a man is bored with Brighton then he's bored with life. Well that may be true but we were fed up with sitting on pontoon 24-11 and as the tides were right and the wind was light and from the southwest, we decided to make a quick passage to Newhaven. 6 nautical miles due East.


It had been rainy and overcast all day but brightened up at about 3pm and we set sail at 4pm. Once again, the Galley Slave did all the manoeuvering. The Skipper is now just about learning to cope with this and still surprised that she hasn't hit anything.


As it wasn't too far, we couldn't be bothered to bring the fenders in or hoist the mainsail. Very sloppy sailing:

and didn't result in us going particularly quickly:

But it did give the Skipper the chance to take some photos. Hopefully the Perv Protection Squad weren't about watching him taking telephoto shots of this location:

Galley Slave looked happy, 

but there again she always is when she has a firm grasp on something.

Finally arrived in Newhaven at about 6:30pm. The visitors pontoon was full up, so we tried to pull into a vacant pontoon just opposite. Unfortunately, the Skipper, who was driving by this stage, failed to keep an eye on the depth sounder and we grounded as we went in. So we backed out and twiddled our thumbs a bit while deciding what to do. Then the nice lady and gentleman from the marina office came and guided us to another berth that we would fit in. We didn't. So we tried another one, we didn't fit in that either. Finally on the fourth attempt we managed to moor up with about 2 feet of water to spare.


It was a nice berth as well. Fantastic views of a scrap heap:

It just gets better. Then the ferry turned up:

Back to Brighton tomorrow, I think.