Sailing Hannah Penn

The feeling this morning is “I can’t believe we are motoring again… We finished wrapping up all of the previous blog posts this morning, then set out for a sail, to somewhere exciting so that we can get in the water.

A side note here is this means we will aim to write these sail logs as we go, so they might get longer, but also more accurate…

Starting the sail

Half an hour in, we are still motoring out to sea with all of the sails up, but not much wind…

Don’t worry though, 35 minuites in we turned the motor off managing 2-3 knots.

An hour later, we came to a stop and started motoring again. Where is the wind?????

Time to reef

Don’t worry, the wind appeared. Once we got fully out of the mouth the wind picked up and we started speed along while Adam was trying to cook the Needle fish from yesterday for lunch!

We started to reduce our sail area, first the mizen came down, then we reefed the genoa, and finally started reefing the main, planning on putting 2 reefs in.

We got past the first reefing line, but the sail stopped coming down half way to the second reef. What was it stuck on?

Looking up we saw one of the sail lugs caught in a feeder line (string) that we have in place to add a second halyard. This meant that we could reef no more, so we raised the sail back to the first reef.

After a couple of gybes downwind on a less rocky point of sail Adam headed up the mast in a bosun’s chair to untangle the mess (which ended up being quick and easy).

Navigating to anchor

We carried on for the rest of the day with a half reefed Genoa and 1 reef in the main. The fish cooking effort had to be restarted once all of the excitement had died down.

The next effort was navigating to our anchorage. We had to change our plan, as we discovered that you need a navigation and anchoring permit for some islands in the area (where we were originally planning on anchoring for the night).

Our new target was a beach that looked well protected from the Atlantic swells, but this meant a change of course, and also navigation around the conservation area that we shouldn’t enter without a permit.

You can see the conservation area boundary line in red below which we should stay north of. This will take us within 10s of feet of some quite shallow areas, and also take us generally through a shallow area that will be funneling the swell.

It’s the closest we have been to the coast, shallows or rocks in a while when actually out sailing, but all went smoothly.

At the anchorage

We found this anchorage on Navily with a single review, so we could have been heading into anything.

Anchoring in around 7-8m, and it was quite windy to start with. We were the only boat around so we ended up putting 40m of chain out.

Adam went for a quick adventure under the boat cleaning the waterline on his way.

Kathryn prepared some tasty tasty dinner including flat breads from a sour dough starter, and soup for dinner.