Pause Buttton pressed

The pause button on my wanderings has been pressed as Vagabond is now back with Swallow Boats for a week or so.

The voyage from Dover to Eastbourne revealed an unexpected leak in the foredeck and Matt (the owner of Swallow Boats) wanted to spend time to find and fix it (them?). He offered to collect Vagabond and take her "home", despite it being a 12 hour round trip.

In the end, we agreed that the best way for this to happen would be for me to arrange an early morning "lift out" and onto the trailer at  Eastbourne and then for me to drive to meet Matt somewhere "en route".
And that's what we did yesterday.  I moved Vagabond to the "boat lift" at crack of dawn (for me, 08:15 to be precise) then lowered and secured the mast. Lowering the mast turned out to be a surprisingly easy "one man" operation, using the spinnaker halyard and the bow roller.

I went off to find the trailer and returned to find Vagabond suspended by the crane. Clearly the crane can handle somewhat larger craft......

The crane crew quickly gave her bottom a power wash and settled her on the trailer, all the time telling me what a pretty boat she was.

It took about an hour and half to pack Vagabond to my satisfaction and we were off to meet Matt at a motorway services.

In the meantime, the Flautist has sent me a few photos that she took on our trip from Ramsgate to Dover, so I thought I'd let you see some of them.

Washing up before we start



Getting geared up



Wondering if the main is set right



Yes, it is.

Finally, one picture from the beginning of the journey to Eastbourne, before we had passed Dungeness.

As you can see, the sea state is "calm".

The cloud formation gave me hope that there was a chance of a sea breeze setting in and giving me less of a head wind. It didn't, and once past Dungeness the sea state changed to "moderate"!

So, there will now be a pause in this blog until sailing is resumed (probably after the shenannigin of the Jubilee)