IJmuiden - Scheveningen - IJmuiden II

A much more pleasant weekend than the one two weeks earlier. Arrived on Friday evening and spent my time with a recurring theme: fixing things. Here the VHF gets bolted on properly and hooked up:

A temporary crew of hardy friends & family stepped on board during the sunny but rather windy Saturday morning. Following a thorough briefing one reef was put into the main and the genoa 3 was hauled on deck. Again, despite slightly more favourable forecasts, the wind was stronger than expected reaching about 20 knots over deck as we beat our way to Scheveningen into the SSW wind and quite a challenging sea.

So here is the crew:

Bro' encouraging early alcohol consumption. (Actually no, that's my beer being looked after.)

And a very fresh shot of the G3 tackling the North Sea:

Struana beating determinedly into the fresh breeze. Here the spare cloth of the reefed main can be seen top right with the genoa not quite hard in to make the ride a bit more comfortable, especially for the kids for whom this was a first. Later, applying some more tension on the sheet with the block perhaps an inch or two too far forward, the leech may have experienced too much tension and the entire sail parted along a horizontal seam. I think the glue holding this sail together had aged since later inspection found most seams ready to be picked lose quite readily. The G3 is no more.

This photo also brings out the drawbacks of short trips, there's hardly the time to get everything set nicely, the halyard could also have used a bit more tension...

We entered Scheveningen quite smartly, even the manoeuvring is becoming more relaxed. Quite excellent dinner in Scheveningen with the parents of all the friends and the Sunday presented the North Sea the way it should be more often: calm with a gentle following wind for our trip back to IJmuiden. An attempt was made at catching some fish from the aft deck, all firmly tied on, of course.

Self portrait on the bow, I was hoping the speed at which we making our way along the Dutch coast would be more evident here, but no, it all looks like a drift across a mill pond.

This time no mad rush to get back into the berth and recover, like last time, instead a relaxed anchor session within the break water of IJmuiden. Struana's underwater ship was given a scrub using the snorkel and she was tidied up ready to be put away, though not before refuelling:

IJmuiden - Scheveningen - IJmuiden I

The weekend of 6 and 7 August proved to be a bit of a disaster. The journey to IJmuiden from Zurich was marred with traffic jams in Germany (in the middle of the night, when we were supposed to have been nicely tucked away in a hotel) resulting in a late arrival in IJmuiden. The weather was forecast to be OK but thundery storms were presented instead. When early afternoon arrived the decision should have been to remain nicely in port, but to Scheveningen we decided to go, 25 miles to the south along the North Sea coast.

It was an OK trip, but the weather wasn't great, with Struana close reaching into the wet westerly wind gusting to 20 knots at times. We arrived too late in Scheveningen to still have a degree of enjoyment.

On Sunday the wind had backed slightly to south south west so it was a dead run back to IJmuiden. But by this time the wind had picked up to 25 knots or a good force 6 so on a full main we powered back to our temporary home port, reaching speeds of 12 knots as the waves started to build. It was nothing out of the ordinary but for a first experience it was quite hairy... These downwind tracks with a building sea are not dissimilar to riding a bike, you've got to keep steering to prevent things from swerving out of control.

During our debrief, reflecting on the weekend and the rather challenging weather we had had three weeks earlier, the seeds for hiring a truck and moving Struana to the Med in 2012 were sown...