Mild Cobweb Removal

With winds forecast a little slacker than of late, we thought to test the new winches and blow out the slightly stuffy feeling of Christmas yesterday. Seven or eight weeks since we last hauled sail and we felt rusty, resorting to check-lists and talking ourselves through the regular procedures of preparation. All smooth except setting out for a minute without cockpit instruments.

We motored up to the wave barrier and wound a few turns of genoa sheet on a shiny new port winch before the Southerly leg of the river set the genoa to flapping, when we furled again, not thinking to raise the main until we turned East. Head to wind briefly and then blown off again with a full main, a little constricted by the tight jacks. Waves from the South-West looked about force 4, foamy crests that rose and fell, but these steadily gave way to a swell and crests tumbling; a little fresher than was expected.

Reminded that we were testing winches I hauled out the genoa on the port side again, but on the beam reach we had set to take us slightly up-tide this just put the port gunwale in the water. We looked at the conditions, we considered the possibility that the forecast was even less accurate than it seemed and decided that once across the Solent and back on the main would be enough. Our roughly repaired ensign was not taking the breeze well and had to be stowed. On the port tack home the tide was evident, drawing us West as we tried to line up the river-mouth in the lightening conditions. We swapped from main to genoa for a stately trip up the river, making 5 knots on part of the small sail.

Furled and back on engine for the harbour we danced with the ferry which was avoiding a yacht coming down with the flow. We moored facing the opposite way to normal at the second attempt. Mooring facing up river leaves the stern open to the prevailing winds and these have been rather wet recently. We hope for drier bilges.

Quite a blow; quite a test after not sailing for a couple of months. Here we are between Christmas and the New Year wearing the gear we usually wear in the summer, perfectly warm and comfortable. I didn't even put my boots on, wearing light deck shoes without socks.

a cosine of the times

Feeling our way out of the river mouth, we operate on a wide range of frequencies from the VHF happily monitoring a calm Channel 16, through the ultrasound measuring the mud, the slightly unsteady throb of a single cylinder diesel powering us out to where the breezes flow, the ebb and flow of tide and the seasonal variations of sun elevation and temperature.

Our path is governed, as usual, by tidal planning. We follow the water or, with the wind's help, hope to lead it. A trip East, to a few yards beyond our furthest excursion that way to date and in to another river where the flow turns with our course and leads us up to a first cluster of moorings. Here we lunch and watch geese, disturbed by guns and dogs, circle nervously.

As flood slows and the natural outflow of the river asserts itself there is a brief rush of small craft who had been waiting for this moment and we join them; passing the river marks in reverse order to the mouth and a swell that lifts and drops us in a new rhythm.

Down-wind this time but still following the flow home, wind dies and we bob along, beating the tide by only a few metres. We stop at our neighbour port for a night, eat well, walk inland to see the sights, wait for the fog to clear and then, just for fun, make 10 miles of the 2 mile journey home.

We follow these oscillations, making our own on the way, but ultimately we follow our hearts, our breaths before the cycle closes.

Cooler than warm

Everywhere I go I find myself watching the trees, drinking in the colours of leaves gently turned towards the fire end of the spectrum. Horse chestnuts have had a bad year with disease and seem pleased to shrivel their canopies to brown arthritic hands; brittle. Maples and Oaks are tinged with oatmeal or bright berry shades, often in patches where a branch has been caught by the season, leaving contrast with the still green remainder. The car-park hornbeams are yellow above and still verdant below; lemon iced.

The car glass has been mopped for more than two weeks already, but this morning the roof was traced with coral fans of ice crystals that spread onto the wind-shield, since I was parked the wrong way and the morning's warmth could not work its melting act.

We re-launched the boat on Monday, trying to calmly eat some sandwich while the hull was lowered once more into its natural environment. We never doubted that the re-assembled sea-cocks would seal, nor that the stern gland would accomodate its new cutlass bearing without a leak, but it was good to check and to take a deep breath before trying to tie to our new mooring up the river. Polishing that hull, standing on the hard on Sunday, we caught some sun.

The weather has turned a corner (as the wind has, literally turned) bringing cold nights and bright days that don't breach the curtains until 7am and by now, at 7pm, have faded to grey. We are excited to be able to sail again, but are thinking of warm socks and boots, scarves and cocoa and bracing breezes.

Drier than wet

Our beautiful boat
Sits on the hard for a scrub.
New cutlass bearing

Equinox or not

We must have had the equinox by now, but following on from the revelations about VW cheating the North American diesel emissions test, actually there is no "equi", there have been about a million tonnes of extra NOX.

Quite a year for weather. Summer was warm, but was it windy? and never dry for too long. There has been a distinct smell of autumn about the weather for a couple of weeks and this morning was only 7 degrees centigrade as I left the house in a damp car on a fresh morning. The Hurst Castle camera showed the Isle of Wight in clear contrast to the cluster of cumulus that hung over it yesterday. The outlines were clear and the sky glowed, reflecting off the overfalls as they began to turn from flood to ebb.

The sun was low in the sky, as it was when I went home yesterday evening. Glaring off the window grime, side-lighting the landscape and its creatures. Ponies half of gold and half dark-horse, eyes glinting between searching browses of the verges.

Of the summer, a deal of business. Weekends of sailing, weeks of work. July's preparation for the New Forest Show, taxiing children. A strange year with a season ticket to A&E; broken bones, leaking lungs, operations and emergencies. Really, five hospitals, a dozen ECGs and probably an equal number of X-rays, four ambulances. How much chaos can two children cause? Even I have been to a hospital; only for a scheduled couple of physiotherapy appointments, but I think they must be the only actual treatment apart from antibiotics I've had since a tonsillectomy at age 6.

We have though had some beautiful days to make up for a few hard nights. The opportunity to sit out in the salt marshes after a day's sailing and hear the sea-fowl fly in to roost has been a wonderful experience and the mooring costs less than a beach-hut. To see the full performance of a setting star when the sky is fully half of the world and the only sound is the lapping of waves, the swoosh of wings and the flight calls of gulls is wonderous. We've slept onboard, but not enough.

So, we hope for a good few sailing days while the children are well and the the freeze holds off before the solstice.

patterns of

I dipped through a college car-park this morning. The pupils were arriving in ones, not the troupes and gangs I remember from my time. They walked like old men, or like robots, asthough having learned to walk as infants and having been rewarded with their first iPad or TV remote, they abandoned any further style development. At their age my peers were learning the strut (power-walking was a thing), the stride, the swagger and even the flounce.

I went for my second Thursday ice-cream at lunchtime. The rule is a simple one: I get to ride to town and buy an ice-cream if I walk back. Today's walk was the usual route from the town centre; over the bridges, passing up through meadows of cows or hay crops, into woodland rising steadily back to work and a short passage in pig fields. I saw brown trout, a hundred meadow browns, a small white, admirals white and red, a cinnebar moth (probably), an orchid (common spotted in damp woodland, very tall). I am reminded to look up this year's sightings of purple emperors (there are none). In the fields the sun is hot, oppressive. In the woods it occasionally cuts in in shafts, scattered.

Three nights running over into the weekend the house was overflown around 9pm with jackdaws; as many as 3-400 on the first evening. Enough for a murmuration, making harsh yet cheering calls and a hissing of wings, looking to roost, gathering the year's young to statistical safety.

I near met a young green woodpecker when driving last week; red crown, freckled below and palely olive above, beaky.

The sky is a blue-board with strokes from the side of the chalk. Parallels and striations, hardly moving. Even as I read-back and review a board cleaner is swept over, forming little clouds of chalk as it blurs the marks; the clouds hang. A single fine line is added by an airliner, etching West.

An interlude in the headlong

Summer I think. A hard season to call with the signs of spring still emerging, slightly late. Although it is a month since the moment I always call the "million shades of green", foxgloves are still only just opening, the elder began to bloom just last week. Never-the-less, it is June and the forest has the crop of early foals gambolling already.

I left the house, which was mostly relaxed, ten minutes earlier than has been my recent habit. Back roads were quiet; crossing routes were so empty that I stopped to watch them almost hoping for other traffic to corroborate my existence. The Plain was full of beasts, some with young. A gathering of ponies pulled in excited animals, some tossing their manes, some trotting and leaping haphazardly on the road. I wondered if they were getting ready to greet a new-born or whether there was a fight; they milled amongst the still-standing gorse between open lawns that have been mown or burnt to increase pasture.

On Monday and Tuesday the weather howled in passing, pouring water that briefly sat in corners until the greatful ground sucked it in. The spring, as well as cooler than normal has also marked long dry spells, but it has been wetter for a couple of weeks. The water has been washing dust out of the air and sprinkling it onto windows.

Today's sky hangs restful. A thin sheet of cloud appears to be trying to spread from one horizon to the other, but there is enough energy in the atmosphere already to roll it into scattered crumb with sporadic doughy fluff.

On reflection

It was driving past a large and partially frozen puddle this morning that caused me to reflect on the books I always planned to introduce to my children when they reached the right age, but never have. My own teenage years were filled, and to a large extent, informed, by a steady stream of science fiction novels by an eclectic range of authors, either borrowed from friends or my local library. I was fortunate in that, once I had exhausted the library's collection of childrens' fiction, I had the opportunity to access the adult fiction too. This resulted in me occasionally reading subject matter considered inappropriate to my age, but on subsequent reflection I believe that this does no harm, because the topics that I did not understand left no lasting impression, in contrast to the stories and themes I was ready for.

My own children (mostly) are willing to read, but they have had their own contemporary diet of Potter, Rider and Snicket. Reading the same books as one's peers is always more interesting than something that an adult is pushing, so many of my recommendations were ignored, or only grudgingly accepted.

So I managed to palm off some Milligan and Adrian Mole, I was fortunate that the Tolkein bandwagon rolled through town. I managed to find time to read and share some of their contemporary fiction, but these failed to engage me, in the same way that re-reading my own childhood favourites fails, because they have to be read at the right age.

The single book that I read at exactly the right age (that sticks in my memory) is "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael G. Coney, which is a science fiction and coming of age story with sociological and political undertones. If you've read it, then you probably understand how its memory was revived by my morning drive; if you have not, then I can't recommend it, unless you are a slightly nerdy 13 or 14 year old. I haven't seen a copy for the best part of 40 years, and perhaps that is for the best, but it is still on my list of books I should have given to my children to read, when they were ready.

Opening soon

Creeping measures of another year; snow drops, daffodils, crocuses, icy panes, bees on camellias, wintery showers, spring light. A red kite.

Birds sing the sun into the sky and collect mosses and dried grasses to call home. Clematis buds and thinks to twine. Evenings gather, rather than fall.

I awake to pale curtains, retaining warmth, restraining the day.

Dusky

Salmon opposes the full, round yellow of the cratered man. As the fish dives and the man rises, points contellate into known patterns; bright sparks on the darkening canvas canopy.

Tiny isolated clouds show darker against the sky's scattered remains of sunlight. In the corners of fields, under hedges, the white remnants of wintery showers shine upwards.

Up

Driving last night, with the evening sky as a backdrop, I was distracted by the Western horizon, still bright with the setting sun. A cerise smudge touched nearly ninety degrees of the scene with traces of blood and milk marking higher cloud and the final rays of the day breaking through.

The same clouds acompanied me on my way to work this morning. A canopy of cryptic corrugations, like snow on willow hurdles , thinning in the East to show cracks of sun like the first shreds of processed cheese emerging from a grater.

At lunchtime the cloud had evolved again and passed from orange peel texture, through crumpled crepe and beach ripples to electron micrographs of prehistoric tooth surfaces, monochrome and strangely ridged.

These skies hold a drama. As picture backgrounds they steal from subjects. They defy cameras.

Wind of change

Earlier, the slight twigs of valley trees tangled a thin mist, preventing it from leaving the river course to form higher clouds. Seen from a hill the bare crowns of these trees appeared snagged in soft cotton-wool that thinned as the grazing land rose to my viewpoint.

The misted sky just fell dark heralding a swift storm of rain bringing wind and a sudden rush of water, like the overflow of a bath in the carpark. Soon this passed and the clouds tore, creating at first a rectangle of baby blue in the grey that had two horizontal stripes of white lit cloud like nothing else but a slice of angel cake. The tear spread from the North Western sky until, above the horizon, clouds made only small scuffs in the graduated blue canopy.

The rising breeze that whipped trees with the rain has waned. Enough to flash the underleaf colour in the evergreen oaks, but playfully; without violence.

Relaxed flocks of winter birds now lazily seek thermals or survey the agricultural landscape for the next safe beak-full. The washed world reflects the new sunlight and gently dries.

The Incredible Lightness of Mornings

Either the lengthening of the day or the extra few minutes spent scraping off windscreen ice allowed the sun to surmount the horizon behind a thin screen of trees to the East of a straight road I use approaching my place of work. The misty grey cloud covering most of the sky trapped these acute sunbeams close to the earth, shedding a pinkish light over the otherwise wintery landscape. Frost clung to the grass on the heaths and the puddles corralled crazy icing in shattered patterns left by browsing ponies and cows.

Southern England was spared much of the exciting weather received in Scotland and the North over the Christmas break, but even so we have our own shipwreck (Technically inaccurate I'm sure as it hasn't been declared a wreck as such). We must regard it as a seasonal decoration for the Brambles Bank. I was mildly disappointed that the poor visibility on Sunday meant that I was unable to see the leaning Hoegh Osaka for myself, but the pictures have been stunning on the island news website, Twitter and elsewhere.

Walking the Forest during the break we heard mostly thrushes, but saw mostly robins. On the heaths crows foraged and an occasional buzzard patrolled. Expecting gales later today the farmland around has already filled with seabirds. On the sunny days the Forest carparks were crowded, but the usual 200 yard rule applied and the paths were no more busy. There were fewer DoE candidate parties. we saw deer from the car, but little sign on the tracks. Most prints were pony, dog or human.