Well yesterday was a mixed day for the results with one half of the family happy with winning the triple crown and me - well let's just say tomorrow is going to be a bad day in work!
So today we celebrated the win with a short cruise down the river and started by hoisting the Welsh flag.
Don't be fooled by the blue sky! It didn't last. It never does up here. We motored through the bridges to catch up Erin who had left a few minutes earlier but were forced to radio them to get them come back and take a photo. This they duly did but despite an hour of post-sail techno effort, none of the assembled "experts" could transfer the picture from John's phone to Pam's. Maybe in a few weeks. Till then you'll have to make do with the one we took from on-board!
OK - now we are still on for the naming part for the tender, with Triple Crown now a real option but Grand Slam Too or Wooden Spoon (despite Scotland's heroic win over a c**p England side - they must beat Italy next week to avoid ending up bottom) our preferred names. Next weekend will be the crunch!
It was an interesting sail. For most of the day it was cloudy and grey with 15-25Knts......and this is a shot you wont see very often, Erin with two reefs in.
We did however see our first flying fish of the season. As Erin was beating back up towards us to take the photo, we caught site of a purple flying fish - we estimated around 6 feet long, flying at around 30 feet heading away from the shore and directly towards Erin. After a bit of discussion we worked out it was probably a dolphin shaped helium balloon which had escaped from some distraught childs hand on shore.
John however helming Erin did not have the luxury of a few minutes discussion - the first he saw of it was this purple fish shaped object coming round the outside of his genoa and banging off the main before nearly getting caught up in the backstay. As they were just about to tack, the rest of the crew were too busy with their other duties to fully comprehend what was concerning John. I don't think it was nearly as big as we had discussed but it must have come as a bit of shock to John. Afterwards we worked out it had probably come from Sea World - so if anyone reading this has lost an errant dolphin, it is now probably on the Isle of May.
It was cold and despite these photo's giving the impression of a nice sunny day (we only got the camera out when the sun was out) we made it down around InchMickery and then beat back up the channel.
This is a nice shot of Inverkeithing (no that can't be right - there are no good shots of Inverkeithing). So back to the Marina and tie up the boat well ahead of the big storm forecast for tomorrow morning - although it looks like Scotland is not going to be too bad - other than snow.
