I used the camera very little in the end as we were too busy mucking about but it was perfect conditions: it was choppy off Cowes but nothing the boat wasn't comfortable with.
Going out for two consecutive days in good conditions and blazing heat was an excellent learning curve and a reminder of things forgotten.
My primary failing was to forget the lesson of boarding school, to always protect one's backside!! Two days of sitting on the aluminium plank and I'm glad to have a comfortable chair in the office!!
Setting up is quick enough and at Beaulieu the girls were very happy collecting old tarp rivets around the dinghy park and at Hayling Island they were down on the shoreline collecting shells. But packing up is a really interesting one. Getting everything back into the car at the end of a long day and facing a near three hour drive is something that has the potential to rip the gilding from the lily. On Sunday I had a friend at the sailing club who helped pack away and it served to highlight the gulf between easy and exhausting.
What I have to consider is that almost always these trips will be day trips and that they will end with 3 hour drives home. On top of that I then need to unpack the boat today to clean it and put it away again.
A smaller, lighter boat wouldn't change that and I am extremely happy with the boat itself.
When on the water you can feel the structure flexing and yesterday, after an hour or so the prop was beginning to cavitate a lot but I couldn't top up the tubes due to the issue with the outboard. Ultimately it was good to experience how the boat changes in this regard. But the 390 size makes it much more relaxing as the girls have enough space to be comfortable while I have enough space to be clumsy at the stern and not kick a child in the head or elbow one when starting the engine.
On the Saturday it performed superbly just mucking about on the river and was excellent crossing the Solent. Much more comfortable than I recall being in a Dell Quay Dory. Top speed on the Solent was 15 knots. I'm not sure I could expect more than that. It hopped onto the plane very easily, the larger waves didn't knock it off and the boat was bone dry.
In short, the set up on the water exceeded expectations and is more than good enough for what I want to achieve which is essentially random day trips with the girls and for them to be laughing all day with me able to join in the laughter rather than stuck having to focus on niggles.
I need to find the right position for the rear bench. It was about right on Saturday but completely wrong on Sunday, too close to the outboard. In some regards I'm wondering if I want a rear thwart as it's more comfortable to sit on the tubes in the river and at sea it might be easier to sit in the deck and glue a nice big handle on inside of the starboard tube. Something to mull over.
Another bit of new knowledge is that on Saturday I only used 5L of fuel. The 25l tank is pretty cumbersome and for starters I won't be filling it again with 25L. I won't need more than 15 and I may just get a 12L tank at some point for the packaging gains.
What else? I got to do some 'child overboard' drills yesterday in the crystal clear, shallow waters of Hayling. They thoroughly enjoyed being thrown off the boat as far as I could manage and swimming back. Lots of fun for them but underneath the fun is the memory now that a bit of disorientation, a bit of salt in the eyes and a bit of swimming and scrabbling back on board is nothing to panic about but something to just do.
Drying off.
It was also the perfect one of year for the jellyfish which kept them preoccupied on Saturday. Luckily I'd packed a bucket so that whiled away an hour at Keeping Trees, in the shade, catching, prodding and releasing them.
On the Saturday, when the engine finally conked out (later realised due to fuel line being disconnected
) the girls were really keen to row and we went up the creeks and they rowed back to the marina. What was weird was something I realised on the drive home which was that their first time rowing was at my father's old mooring and the exact spot where I had learned to row 40 years earlier!!
So all in, an excellent couple of days with only a tiny bit of tinkering required going forward and two very happy sproggs who are already talking about doing more.
The one elephant in the room is the setting and packing up.
The reality is that because our drives are so long the time and effort to do this at either end of the journey eats massively into the time we have on water.
There is a really simple solution and that is to relocate this aspect to the days either side. It makes far more sense, given my situation of long drives and having to set up on my own while also looking after two children near water to actually do the set up the evening before at home and transport the inflated boat there and back on a trailer and then clean and stow at leisure the next day. Launching and recovering by hand remains sensible but being able to shift a large chunk of the work away from the actual day is going to be immensely beneficial. In these Covid times I can't even send the children to the Master Builders to buy themselves a fizzy drink and a bowl of chips as a treat while I huff and puff packing away.
As the whole purpose is maximum fun but packed into really short days then this morning I'm finding myself thinking I'd be very smart to buy a basic road trailer as it will give us potentially an extra two hours on the water and eliminate the boring bit for the children who in a more normal world I'd be able to send off on their own for treats.
