My sea trip with Daniel and Steve on The Paxton Princess out of Yarmouth, around the North Norfolk coast and then the inshore passage from Blakeney into the Lynn Channel in the spray before cruising straight up the New Bedford to Erith to moor up at Westview Marina after dark. Then eating on board in the absence of any food venues.
I was the first to awake at 5.00am and got dressed and put the kettle on as the others came to. We were ready to go in no time and I made clearance calls to Port Control and to the Yarmouth Coastguard where they were reporting SE 3/4 from yesterday's forecasts. Daniel steered a course from the harbour entrance, whilst I checked around the boat for problems and also got the plotters and auto-pilot working. At first, we could not get the autopilot to home in with small cross track errors until we realised that we had to be exactly on course (or with a cross-track error of less than 0.31) before it came in when it kept us on a very exact course indeed. The exit from Yarmouth was quite wavy as the tide raced in the river mouth to fill the Broads and slack water would have been better but we wanted to get on. Then we turned and were beam-on to the wind, but things settled down as I got in better control of the navigation aids and we started the long haul around the North Norfolk Coast.
** "Read More" BELOW for the complete story **
The visibility was poor at about a mile for most of the time which did not help. When off Blakeney, I had a course conference with Steven and we opted for a short cut across the sands, even though it was wind-against-tide and a low Spring Tide at that. I charted an accurate dog leg that maximised the depth and this gave us a 5-metre channel for the most part which was a good route to find for the future. The wind was light South-Easterly to start with and the sun hot and weather very pleasant, but it was turning around to the South-Western quarter and freshening all the time, until we were fighting our way into Lynn Channel with salt spray everywhere which was safe but exiting! A fortunate calculation error on my part had us starting out a couple of hours earlier than intended and so we were approaching Kings Lynn at a state of tide that allowed us to cruise over the sand bar and could consider proceeding straight up the New Bedford Channel to Erith.
This meant pushing on a bit but we felt it was worth it to save half a day's wait for the next tide. We managed this with some little room to spare as we tried to be early enough to give air draft under the bridges whilst late enough to give water draft off the bottom. The only problem was that we picked up what appeared to be a motor cycle tyre or piece of wood or plastic bag that wrapped itself around the propellers. The new prop' cutters dealt with it but only at a cost of a scraping noise from the port shaft afterwards. We arrived in Erith after dark, choosing to moor at Westview Marina until morning. Strenuous efforts to find somewhere to eat at that time in Erith proved fruitless but, after a long and tiring day, Steven cooked the meal and I did the washing up before we turned in.