May. 26, 2009 - Aground Again!

Went over for a quiet weekend with Jimbo. He didn’t want to do much sailing, just wanted to “chill” – have a bar-b-que, watch the Monaco Grand Prix, have a walk and generally take it easy. And that is exactly what we did.

Saturday morning we did some shopping in the village, got some excellent kebabs at the local butchers and some nice rolls at the bakers. We then headed off to the fuelling jetty where the holding tank pump out is located as the previous trip had left the holding tank full. In order to get close enough to the pump out point you have to go on the same bit of jetty as the boats that are refuelling. Given that it was a Saturday afternoon, of a public holiday weekend and by this time the weather was terrific, we expected quite a queue. In fact we didn’t have to wait too long and the whole process was completed quickly.

The sail up to the Haringvreter was good, full main and genoa. The water was pretty busy and we started to think that we might not be able to find any space at the main harbour/jetty we had in mind – the one we have been to previously. And indeed it was full, but about a quarter of a mile away there is a good sized jetty which is not attached to the island. This had quite a bit of space.

Presumably most people want access to the thunder boxes, bins and the nice grassy area. It suited us fine as it gave an excuse to get the tender out and to use its outboard, which had not been fired up since last year when it was serviced.

We got the Cobb out and cooked up the kebabs, just as it started to rain. The Cobb is not affected by the rain as it has a cover. The rain did produce a wonderful rainbow, though.

The rest of the evening was spent watching a film.

Sunday we had a very leisurely day, Kim had a swim (the Germans on the neighbouring boat thought he must like cold water but it was actually 17 degrees, which isn't too bad for May!)

and we played with the Man-Overboard recovery device and boarding ladder. This was a very useful exercise as Wendy attempted to get Kim back on board over the side. In a choppy sea, getting back on board via the swim platform at the back would be too dangerous as the stern of the boat would be bouncing up and down too much. The whole exercise proved to be hard work, Wendy attached the rescue/lifting strop to a spare halyard and then winched Kim up as he climbed the webbing ladder. Neither the winching nor the ladder would have worked on their own, but combined, it was just about possible for Wendy to get Kim back on.

After the exertions of all that Kim and Jim settled down to watch the Grand Prix.

Then we went over to the island in the tender (all of about 100m!) and had a pleasant walk round the island. All the time the sun shone and it was glorious! Sunday night we had a lasagne that Wendy had prepared at home and had an early night. We started to have a problem with the house battery getting low. The nav instruments were inadvertently left on over Saturday night and with the boat not motoring anywhere we had to put the engine on a couple of times to recharge the batteries.

Monday morning we headed back to our marina. Kim had made a towing strop for the tender, so instead of deflating it and putting it away we towed it all the way back.

The grounding occurred as we were beating up from the Bad Hotel. We were on Starboard tack running up a line between two green buoys out on our port side. We were in effect sailing along the 5m contour. At this particular spot the bottom shoals very steeply so we had little room to play with. Kim hadn’t been watching the depth gauge and the first warning was the 2.0m alarm going off. Kim threw a tack in immediately, but too late, we grounded. There was not a lot of wind and we were sailing quite slowly – 2 knots maybe. The strange thing is that, when clearly stuck on the bottom, the depth gauge was showing 1.9m – we draw 1.5m! We whipped the sails away and started motoring astern and slowly she came out. Veerse Meer mud is very forgiving!

With three adults on board and no access to proper toilets, the holding tank was completely full again, so we decided that it would be easier to empty it before berthing the boat, rather than leaving it till the next trip over (which is in two weeks time). Monday was not a public holiday in the Netherlands (they had theirs on Friday) so we thought it would be dead easy and quiet. It wasn’t! There other boats waiting to refuel and when we did get on the jetty, we found that we needed the Havenmeister to switch the pump on and he had gone to lunch. Fortunately, he interrupted his lunch for us.

The long and short of it all was that by the time we had pumped out the tank, got back on our berth (which took two attempts), put the tender away and then done all the usual packing away things, it was getting on for 2.00pm – we were booked on the 5.00pm ferry and really should have left by 1.30pm latest! As headed back to Dunkerque the sat nav had our arrival as 4.30pm, Wendy was confident we would still make our ferry – check in time is 45 mins prior to departure. 10 kms out from Dunkerque we encountered road works and the next thing is, the Sat Nav is predicting arrival at 4.45pm! Well, we checked in and were told we were booked on the 7.00pm ferry and no we couldn’t get the 5.00pm one – we were too late. Wendy remained confident, though her confidence wavered a bit at the sight of the usual queue for UK passport control.  But we drove round to the holding area to find they were still loading. So by the skin of our teeth we caught the ferry! In fact, we were put on the lorry deck which meant that when we got to Dover we disembarked before the cars – a real result!

So, all in all, a very enjoyable weekend with better than expected weather.

We have another long one booked in two weeks time.