23rd, July a shitty day

I was up at Lidl with Sue for opening time and we bought some bits and pieces including breakfast croissants. Back at the boat I’d already topped up with water and we left at 0900 and breakfast was had under way. It was cloudy in the morning but dry. The wind was light and ENEly, again on the nose. We motored down stream among the early morning traffic, there were lots of ferries, tour boats, 3 cruise ships and plenty of pleasure yachts and speed boat. Wending our way through islands we were soon passing Vaxholm and the castly island off it’s eastern shore. We wanted to press on to get away from the busier parts of the Archipelago. To Graham the busy  ness was unsurprising, he’d been here several times before but I was surprised at how busy and populated it all was, Vaxholm which I’d imagined to be an island with a few houses on it was a minor metropolis with big marina and a floating fuelling pontoon with 12 fuel pumps on it. Past Vaxholm it was about 1100 and I thought we’d stop for lunch so headed for a likely looking bay where we dropped anchor. The boys looked at the stern anchoring arrangement and fiddled around with them, I had wondered about using a spinnaker pole as a sort of sternsprit to allow the anchor to dangle but the anchor wasn’t that heavy and it appeared feasible to launch it by hand, so we didn’t try it. Having made some adjustments to the arrangements and re secured the anchor to the pushpit we put the boarding ladder over the side and all swam to a small island to the North of us about 50 metres away. Back aboard  we had  had a fine lunch. The waterways are real highways with every craft imagineable pottering, zooming and whooshing about. One, a foiling electric speed boat may have been an indication of future styles. Under way again mid afternoon an issue with the aft loo needed a little clearing up but it didn’t appear to be a problem with the loo  system itself. The forward head had been behaving oddly too, I’d fitted a black water holding tank to it over the winter and noticed that, in use, it became increasingly hard to pump out the loo. I’d been surmising my own theories as to why this could be but the evidence didn’t quite fit in with this. Upon drawing the system and asking Graham to see what he thought he immediately came up with a blocked vent pipe as being the likely culprit. I thought this unlikely as I’d only ever had about a third of a tank full in the past but thought it was worth trying to see so got the ships snake out and fed it through the  the vent which worked in that I got it about as far as the tank entry but couldn’t get it any further. I then tried loosening a couple of bolts on the inspection hatch to see if there was pressure there. There was. I then wondered whether I had omitted to take out the blanking piece from the vent entrance to the tank. I hadn’t. I removed this, luckily a fairly simple operation, as the fittings are hand tightened and, hey. presto, we had a problem free black water circuit. Hopefully.

We were now sailing the easy bits and approaching our final, hopefully, destination for the night a big bay on Bockholmen Island where we hoped to find a rock face to anchor close enough to to walk ashore.

In the bay there appeared a likely looking spot beside another boat down at the bottom of the bay. The skipper on the other yacht was very helpful and pointed out a likely place to try and stood and waited to help with the lines. We backed over to the other side of the bay Graham and Colin dropped the kedge anchor and we crept over to the rock. I went ahead at one point whilst meaning to go astern which wasn’t good but we didn’t quite hit the rock.  Colin went ashore with Sue and they took the line from our neighbour putting one around  to a convenient tree on the port bow and I then dug out a spare 50 metre line and Colin did some mountaineering to an inconvenient tree on the starboard bow at one point having to throw it over  a  too small but not conveniently short tree in the way. We now looked like we were sort of held in 3 points but as we tried to pull our bow away from the rock with the anchor it became increasingly easy to pull in the stern anchor a CQR. It was not holding. So we  tied a long line to the bow lines, backed out again re set the stern anchor and tried again. We did this 3 more times but the bloody anchor refused to set and as it was getting close to 1800 we decided to give up and just anchor in the middle of the bay with the normal anchor, which we then did and had a lovely relaxed evening  sitting in the cockpit watching a  gorgeous sunset.

Convenient tree

The less convenient tree

Vaxholm Castle