Another adventure begins

 After a frenetic couple of weeks of sorting, packing and transporting, we have moved back aboard Maunie for another big trip. The house, garden and, most importantly, Bertie the cat, are in the care of our friends Paul and Tracey who have taken up residence, along with Huxley the Labrador, and we're re-adjusting to life aboard Maunie.

The plan for the next three months is to re-trace some of our track of last summer - up to the west coast of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. However, this year we want to spend a reasonable chunk of time in the Hebrides before (weather and time permitting) sailing to Orkney and then round the NE corner of Scotland, down to Inverness and through the Caledonian Canal (which links into Loch Ness) to Fort William before returning home.

'Weather permitting' is, of course, an important proviso in such plans and it hasn't started terribly well, to be honest. This week's forecast is for very gentle winds - this is tomorrow's chart:

However, we have learned to be optimistic and to search for little weather windows and our first sail today, 32nm from the Dart to the River Yealm, was a good example. We fully expected to have to motor the whole passage but managed a really lovely hour with the spinnaker flying.

In the River Yealm on a drizzly evening

The whole visitors' pontoon to ourselves

So, we'll take each day as it comes and hope that normal south-westerlies will return early next week to send us north up the Irish Sea. We'll update this blog as and when we can.