| 6th August 2009 - Hull to Farndon | |
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Up at 0515hrs! Burning and
turning by 0555hrs and in the lock ready to lock up (yes up)
onto the Humber at 0600hrs. We had a short wait for
another small cruiser to join us in the lock, turned out this
was Skin Deep from Farndon who proposed he would follow us back,
so out we all cruised onto the Humber in daylight (for a change)
but poor visibility (no change). Visibility reduced to
near zero at one point which forced us to reduce speed but as we
approached Trent Falls things improved and we motored on down
the Trent just ahead of the top of the tide. Brad (our boat club Commodore) was at West Stockwith so as we approached Eric popped on a cap and used the ships whistle to pipe Brad as we passed and Brad took a few photos of us on our final leg - Thank you Brad :-) The sun came out and we with plenty of water under the keel we enjoyed the cruise up to Cromwell. Bit of a delay at Cromwell, not sure what the Lock Keeper was thinking but with five boats waiting to lock up a single cruiser managed to have the lock turned round just for him to lock down!!! To top that off once in the lock we were informed that Nether lock was experiencing problems with the gates - this had a temporary fix but had failed and now work was underway to get the lock operational again - we were hoping this would not delay us too much. Luckily as the gates opened the word from Nether lock was that things were ok and the gates were indeed now operational again. Through Nether lock and past Kings Marina I was anticipating that getting under Newark Town bridges would be tight as I had noticed that the water level was up a little while passing under the bridges so far, interesting point to note that on the tidal Trent we had to drop the mast for almost all of the bridges, even with Spring tides we haven't had to do this before! We made it through the bridges - only just - literally inches to spare, too close for my comfort, on past Newark Marina and I stayed up on the fly bridge for the remainder of the journey back to Farndon. This was done using plenty of revs on the Starboard engine as we still have a broken Port throttle! We arrived back in Farndon at 1500hrs, back into our berth just before the rain came. Tired and weary we didn't achieve much in the afternoon apart from eating and sleeping! Three weeks instead of two but a great achievement and yet again Sanity has done us proud - although we do have a lengthy defect list now! We have a number of great publications and books available for the trip down the Seine, and of course all the relevant charts so do let us know if you would like to borrow these, I am sure we will catch up with many people in due course to share our experiences. I haven't calculated the fuel used as yet - but it's a lot - and the initial approximation for nautical miles covered is somewhere around 1,500NM. I will update once I have the information to hand. Until then......Sanity Out. Tim Steele
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| Poor visibility on the Humber | Concentration! |
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| Out comes the Sun | Pleasure cruising again! |
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