Big gaps

Sorry folks, it's been a few days since the last update which has worried a few people... nothing untoward going on, honest. I am really touched by how many people have emailed or phoned me to see why I have disappeared! Thank you all for your support and interest, it means more than you can know.

Gushing soppy bit over...

Had a chemo session on Wednesday last week. All very calm, took a while to get going but once we started all was smooth. It was a bit dull to know that the stuff going in would be removing my taste-buds again, as food is a great pleasure in my life, but in the grand scheme of things I can live without the joy of spice for another couple of weeks, I guess. However the hair on the head is still there, although the lashes and brows are now pretty much gone. Odd how it affects different areas of hair differently.

Thursday (the day after the chemo) we decided to go sailing... yes, I know, but you can't let these things get in the way, can you? We had agreed to go to the Isle of Wight for an event, a little race thingy, a friend had asked us to crew for him but then had plenty of crew so we decided we'd go anyway and entered ourselves. This meant the usual big panic Thursday morning to get everything ship-shape and stowed before we missed the tide. As always, we had a pretty disappointing journey out Thursday - the wind around Bognor Regis seems to have a talent for finding the pointy end of the boat - and despite the engine manfully doing its stuff we were still dropping the anchor at 3.30am in a local harbour (we always seem to get to this particular place at 3am!). Crew who were supposed to be joining us Friday morning discovered at the last minute that they could not, so we made an early start and headed west.

Friday was, all in all, a good day's sailing. Dear husband was sat at the tiller with a silly grin on his face, as the boat romped along under staysail and reefed main. I sat and complained that I could see green water through the portholes... The wind was in exactly the right place, and plenty of it (hence the reef, which means that we folded the bottom of the mainsail away to make it a bit smaller!) and with the tide behind us, our speed over the ground was in the high sevens and hit ten knots at a few points! It was all a little more exciting than I would have liked... the trouble is that where I was sat I ended up with my left arm hooked around the guardrail, and of course the left arm is the one with the PICC line, so that wasn't ideal. But everything was ok, and while getting the sails down was plenty exciting enough it was all done without excessive drama and we were tied up in our destination harbour by mid-afternoon. We had a gentle afternoon row to the quay and a mad dash into the town to acquire further painkillers (it's the achey phase of the chemo cycle) before retiring to the boat to plan the evening's excitement. Bearing in mind that the previous night had involved hitting the sack at 4am and arising at 7.30am, it will surprise nobody that Friday evening consisted of getting supper on by 6, eating about 7 and being tucked up in bed by 8pm. It was very sad - I have now found out that it is possible to have "leftover wine", a concept I had really never understood before, but we were both so worn out that the half-decent Rioja was rather wasted upon us!
Saturday dawned bright, shiny and blue-skyed. And quite windy. We had spoken to another crew member who had promised to come and join us via the ferry Saturday morning, as he had been working on Friday, and been quite doubtful about whether we would fancy racing on Saturday if it was windy. However, the crew was determined, and appeared bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the 9am boat... So that was that decided then. Being a devout coward, I decided to chicken out of the race. I didn't feel strong enough, to be frank, and I felt that having me aboard would just be something for the guys to worry about, apart from me not actually contributing. So I retired to the local yacht club bar with my book to watch the race and take pictures. As it happened, the wind wasn't anything like as strong as it had been the previous day, and the sunshine made a huge difference to morale across the fleet. The boys went out and had a great time, they didn't get placed, but they finished respectably and the boat looked an absolute dream as she creamed along the Solent catching the sun on her sails...
That evening's entertainment was supper in the yacht club, and we were sat in the bar wondering what had happened to the friends who had originally enticed us along to the event... when they finally arrived. They'd had a much more exciting time than we had, and not in a good way... They had set off from Brighton early on Friday, and had had a fair amount of wind along the way. Just off Selsey there are quite a lot of rocks, but there is a safe passage through which is clearly marked, and they had just passed out of this area (the Looe Channel) when it all got a bit bumpy. This shouldn't normally have been a problem, but as they plunged into one wave the bowsprit (the stick sticking out of the pointy end on an old-fashioned boat) broke off - there must have been a previous weakness or damage, he hasn't owned the boat all that long so it's perfectly possible. This meant that the jib (the foremost sail) was now flying around, the flogging sail caused other damage, and at some point one of the ropes went over the side and did what ropes always do in such circumstances - it went and cuddled the propeller. Now they were in something of a pickle, as they had little effective control... so they did the sensible thing, called the Coastguard who launched a lifeboat. They were quickly towed into safety where they could spend the night and work out what to do next. After getting the recalcitrant rope off the prop and buying quite a lot of replacement string they were in a position where they could move on and eventually arrived at their destination about 7pm Saturday having missed most of the event. However, they were safe and well and it all could have been much worse. So we will all put another quid in the next lifeboat collection box we see (if you sail at all, you quickly find that you cannot actually walk past a plastic lifeboat without trying to put money into it!) and wish a hearty vote of thanks to the brave lads and lasses of Bembridge Lifeboat crew and the rest of the RNLI.

Sunday wasn't quite so shiny and bright as Saturday had been, but we needed to get rolling, and had paid the harbour bill and got underway by ten. The way the tides worked, if we had tried to get all the way to our home mooring we would have ended up hanging off the harbour wall for a few hours waiting for the high tide - our mooring dries and we can't get on or off outside about an hour either side of high tide. I didn't fancy the stress of doing that, and also I felt that we both needed a good night's rest again - we had been up until 11 Saturday night, and busy harbours are noisy places - ropes and wires rattling againts masts, wind generators whining, and the wind itself howling all night - so we had neither of us slept well. Our crew had left on the 8am ferry, so it was just the two of us again, so we decided to make for the same harbour where we'd spent Thursday night - hoping to get there before 3am this time! In the end, we had another cracking day, sailing beautifully, and were sat at anchor safely by early evening, with sausages sizzling on the stove. This was a quiet, peaceful anchorage, with only a gentle breeze and the chuckling of the water around the boat to disturb us.. and the occasional clank of the anchor chain on the bobstay but I think that's perfectly fine, and compared to dozens of other people's halyards clanking all night it was paradise!
Monday was a somewhat disappointing day - the wind had died right off and moved into the South-East, which was exactly what we didn't want, but it seemed churlish to complain after having had some really good sailing weather. So we motored all the way home, and the engine behaved beautifully all the way. By a happy coincidence (or good planning if you prefer) we arrived back on our mooring about half an hour after high water, which meant that the stream worked in our assistance and we slipped gently alongside with no drama at all.

So now we are back home, with a big pile of laundry and another list of things that we need to change/fix/rearrange on the boat - every time we go out for a weekend we learn more and find more little jobs to do. The long winter evenings will just fly by!

Now wasn't that nice - something other than cancer to talk about for a change!