TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

The first morning briefing doesn’t follow the normal format of “This is where we are going today”.

The weather men are threatening Severe Gales and Isolated Thunderstorms and the flotilla lead skipper has decided that it is too dangerous to take the fleet out, as he has to remember that some crews aren’t very experienced.

“You can go out for the day if you want to, but please come back here for tonight”

Well I have an inexperienced crew with me for this trip, Gary my only crewman has only done 18 days on yachts, but that is 18 more than he had when we started the last trip, but there were four of us aboard that time.

Oh well we will go out and see what the sea state is like out-side the shelter of Sivota Bay, and work out how we are going to do things with just the two of us aboard.

Wind is probably a good Bf5 and the waves are running at about a metre and a half and Gary finds that you are a lot closer to the water on a Jaguar then we were on the Bavaria 42 we had in May.

After about half an hour of bouncing, and trying to get him used to a tiller we turn back for Sivota and start to set things up for our first solo Mediteranean mooring.

Gary has only been at the helm for one or two moorings and was still trying to get to grips with his first boat with a tiller. There was also a nasty cross wind coming down the valley so I decided to take the helm and get Gary to drop the anchor.

We were going in stern-to as the quay is quite low so I lined her up upwind of our target berthing point and started to go astern.  “Let go” and Gary dropped the bow anchor and scrambled back to handle the stern lines.

That is where the trouble starts. We have dropped far more scope than we should have and as the stern reaches the quay the wind catches the hull and we spin into a side-to mooring position.

Get the windward stern line on and dash forward to pull the bow back out with the anchor chain and we are under control again. Adjust the stern lines and the anchor and she is snug again.

I think we had better work out a better way of parking this thing…