Easter 2007
With the beautiful weather still holding over Easter, the family decided to go out again. A lot more work still needed to be done and a good place to do that is alongside a pontoon. We first took Sea Ghost out of Conwy river past Perch, but with a force 5 blowing from the NE and no working reef, we turned back after an hour bouncing up and down the waves.
Cleaning the boat along the pontoon in Conwy river.
Geke and I did some work on the boat alongside the pontoon. One urgent task was to (untangle the main sheet and to) restore the main sail roller boom which needed relocating the main sheet to the end of the boom. Meryl and Timo went crab fishing and ran up and down the pontoon, at the end of which a real pirate ship was moored.
All was well and we were looking forward to a good night sleep which was the outlook up to the moment when I pushed the plastic box with mooring ropes back through the rear hatch. A "clonk& was heard followed by the relaxing sound in rushing seawater. A sea cock had fallen off...
The happy family in search of a midnight B&B
Slightly pale and with a sinking feeling I started shouting for a towel. Naturally my own was handed down to be sacrificed. The towel was pushed as good as possible in the hole to reduce the water to a trickle. At this point the crew had abandoned ship with half the gear and were waiting, as trained, for instructions.
The instructions were to put everything back on board after which we would try to beach her for
repairs the following day. Not easy at low tide and around 22:00.
The engine started and we motored to the jetty. The family was put
in a B&B and I got help from Gareth, another sailor who we met earlier before mooring onto
the pontoon. Gareth helped me stop the inrush of water to nearly nothing with the help of some
resin suspiciously looking like a stick of dynamite.
At around 24:00 Gareth went back to his boat, Jambelina. I used the longest warp (30m)
available and decided to pull Sea Ghost every hour further up onto the beach. At HW+1 she
settled next to the jetty, which was around 5:00 am.
Not the quiet night we expected then.
The day after the night before
The next morning we got lots of help and with the right tools both the starboard and port sea cocks were taken out and replaced by new ball-valve types. There was some worry whether Sea Ghost would float again that evening as the tide was about a foot less than the night before. About 30 minutes before HW she came of the sandbank.
Alongside Conwy jetty for emergency repairs.
We took her back to the pontoon to celebrate she was still afloat and to try for once to have a good night sleep. It worked.
Captain Timo in search of land...only looking in the wrong direction
The next morning in the sunshine we had breakfast along the pontoon. Again we took Sea Ghost out through Conwy river and followed the buoyed channel but with no wind, the tide out and petrol relatively low we decided to take no risk and returned to Conwy.
Alongside Conwy jetty to drop of the gear before mooring on the swing buoy.
After dropping the kids and the gear off, Geke and I took Sea Ghost to her mooring and rowed back to the dock. The end of an eventful set of days.