All posts by Paul Blacknell

I caught the sailing bug in 2010 and have grabbed every opportunity to sail since then. Since then my family has trained as Competent Crew and we bareboat chartered in the Ionian in 2011 & Croatia in 2014 having an outstanding time. I’ve competed in all the Round the Island races since 2011 (skippering in 2014 & 2017) and vow to enter in each of my remaining years. I'm a commercially endorsed Yachtmaster Offshore.

10 hours on the water

A long day today and it isn’t over. We were up in Lymington at 6.30 so that we had time to make it all the way over to Chichester and back to Cowes. So 9.5 hours and about 56nm altogether.

Tonight we’re going to sail over to Hamble after the sun sets so everyone gets to experience sailing at night – not necessary for comp crew but another example of how we’ve done more than the course requires.

Wish us luck!

Drilling it in to us

Well, although there wasn’t much wind today we did a fair amount of practising. After leaving the marina we practised mooring up on a training pontoon (so called pontoon bashing) a couple of times, which gave the boys a chance to take turns in stepping off and get the lines secured.

Then we moved back out on to the Solent and tacked repeatedly. Although the wind was very calm it was very repetitive and again a chance to practice something over and over again.

IMG_0443

Finally, we did a number of man overboard drills (which freaked Helen out a bit!) – our fastest time was about 3m 55s.

Then into Lymington’s Berthon Marina to check out what was easily easily the poshest shower block in the Solent.