Alistair Tyrrell

31 Dec 2013 I bought Elsa at the end of Feb 2013. Lying in Portsmouth Harbour, I made many day trips down visiting her, familiarising, practising, and motoring / sailing around inside the harbour. A combination of unfavourable Easterly winds, lack of confidence, and hoping for crew availability kept her in Portsmouth until I made my epic solo passage round to Littlehampton in mid May. I bought the boat thinking I’d be doing coastal passages, overnight trips, weekending along the Sussex coast and to the Isle of Wight and places. But it turned out I didn’t do any of that. Someone suggested I go racing and I found that to be huge fun. Short duration cruiser races, around the cans outside Littlehampton, with various crew, combining with lunch and drinks in the clubhouse chatting to the other crews, was great. We’ve ended the season placed 5th out of 9 boats in the Arun YC ‘Len Nolan series’ of cruiser races, an excellent result for my first year of competing. I’ve had lots of advice a

22 Dec 2013 The dredging activity has finished and the volunteer workforce at the club has begun to rebuild the pontoon structures. This will carry on into January but there's enough of it built now to allow some boats to move back. The club is also keen to minimise the cost (as the club is paying for the various temporary berths around the harbour). My temporary berth down the river was ok but very exposed and turbulent. On the hard sand Elsa sat up on her keel stub looking very ungainly. I was able to walk all around her at low tide and I took the opportunity to get the rudder off and took it to a metal fabricator to get a new blade built. So when the word came that it would be good to move back, I wondered how I could do that without the rudder. Steer her with the outboard alone? Maybe that would be ok in a wide flat smooth area but in that turbulent place with other boats around I wasn't sure. I went down on Friday lunchtime to see what to do and met John Bewsey who i