Last week saw me commuting into Plymouth each day from Monday to Friday to complete my RYA Day Skipper Shorebased Theory. I needed to be at the course venue by 0900 each day and this meant an early start on the boat followed by a 500m row to shore, 3km walk/cycle into Saltash to catch the train into Plymouth then another 3km cycle to the venue. A full 6 - 8 hours of course work followed by a return commute the same as the morning. Light the fire, think about dinner, do any homework and sleep.

On the whole the commute became routine with coffee at Saltash station, coffee on the way home. Two days were spent travelling in attrocious weather.

The course delivery though was much more trying than it needed to be with poor preparation by the tutor, patronising responses to questions, confusing jumping around with the details. Hard for me to follow, never mind the other student who had dyslexia and struggled with the steps towards concepts. Not a provider I shall recommend to others..!

Back to my normal routine of no routine, now.

As this last monday was a nice day I dropped the mooring to go fill up on fuel. water and replace a gas bottle at Mayflower Marina. Not the easiest marina to get into at the fuel dock. Shallow, narrow and turns out a very short pontoon/dock. I set myself the challenge, just about pulled it off, saved by the breeze blowing onto the pontoon - only for a chap to shout down ’we’re not dispensing fuel today’. Now I had to extricate myself…

I then set off a bit further around the Sound to Queen Annes Battery Marina. I arrived to find a broken down yacht on the fuel pontoon and no room for Dawn to fit on.

Rather than head back up the river and have to come all the way back another day I checked the forecast for overnight into Tuesday and decided to go anchor in Jennycliff Bay which is just inside the breakwater.

A nice calm night preceded by a great sunset. I woke in the morning thinking I’d gone back to the C18th as the first thing a saw was a three masted ship at anchor just two or three cables away.

I’m now back on my mooring in the River Lynher. Hoping to make use of the marginal Spring tide this weekend to dry out against the quay wall and inspect the Stern Gland which has been leaking. Hoping to find the kind of packing currently in use so I can replace or it might just need re-greasing. But I’ll probably replace the packing anyway, and re-grease. I also have a manual damper section being delivered by courier from Kuranda Heating who sell spares for the Dickinson Newport Heater I have aboard which I hope will help with getting better heat out of the stove. Essentially it was the cheapest option to try and fix my issue with little effective heat output.

After this I expect to settle down for the winter really, and if the weather looks nice over a couple or three day stretch I’ll head off to sail.