We spent the first full week of July trying to hide from the heat in London on the boat. Sunday 5/7 saw us leave Birdham for the Beaulieu river, where we exercised our RCC membership perk of a free mooring in the river. We stayed a couple of nights and on the Monday night took the tender ashore at the Royal Southampton Yacht Club’s Gin’s Farm landing for a nice walk ashore where we got to watch some farm workers rounding up cattle in the marsh, in order to put ear tags on the newest calves.
We were both working, courtesy of the Starlink, so could only move the boat outside office hours, meaning that it was late afternoon on Tuesday when we were able to sneak across the Solent, towing the tender, to anchor in Newtown Creek, where we spent a further couple of nights. We found that our solar array offset most of our daytime power consumption and even charged the batteries a bit, so we had no concerns about power all week, which is areal vindication of the system.
I’d been struggling for a while with what turned out to be a return of the Post Viral Fatigue that has plagued me since I had Covid quite badly in 2020, and a secondary infection that was affecting my ears. The idea had been to have a gentle week and rest up to recover, but by the end of the week I was no longer in a fit state to work. We headed back to Buckler’s Hard for Thursday evening, and spent the nigh in the Marina, filling the near empty water tanks (turns out we use about 40l/head/day when eating and showering aboard) and taking the opportunity to fill with diesel on Friday morning, after I’d had a teams call with my consultant.
We spent Friday night back on a mooring down river and saw the start of the Round the Island Race pass the Beaulieu river on Saturday morning.
We headed home on Saturday, passing the returning RTI fleet off Bembridge.
We paused briefly in the Thorney Channel, but decided that the increasing forecast made it more sensible to lock back into Birdham that evening, and returning to London in the morning.