I'm off!

Well I thought I was.  I'd said my goodbyes to the people at the yard, fired up the engine and cast off.  Half a mile 'down the road' I switched on my instruments (depth, speed, wind etc) and ...... nothing!  'Bugger it' I said.  And that's mild for me.  I was approaching a line of mooring buoys so I picked one up, switched off the engine and started my investigation into the recalcitrant intruments.  Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of me for 10 minutes later I'd cured the problem.  I was certainly proud of me. Well, perhaps not so proud because whilst I had my instruments back I'd now lost a number of the lights on the control panel and my CD player was silent.  Try as I may I couldn't trace the new fault.  There are about 40-50 wires in there and they make Spaghetti Junction look like a roman road.  I headed back to the yard.  The normally implacable owners were surprised to see me.  The look on their faces said so.  They hadn't been expecting me back until the end of August and here I was, back after 45 minutes.  Fortunately there was an electrician in the yard working on another boat.  He came straight over and traced and fixed my fault in 15 minutes.  How do they do that?  How did he know which wires were the problem?  I know he had one of those magic meters but even so!

I cast off again.  Wind on the nose (as always) so I motored out of Mariehamn.  Rodham, my first planned stop, was only 10 miles or so away.  'I'll be there in a couple of hours' I thought.  Fatal.  DON'T tempt the gods.  When will I learn?  I set up the autohelm  and ........ nothing.  'I'm not going back to the yard again.  They'll think I've got an ulterior motive!'  So I carried on, trying to coax the autohelm into submission without success and hand steering through the rain which soon came to greet me.  The sun had been glaring down an hour before.  Leaving the helm only for a few seconds to consult the chartplotter saw the boat going off course under engine and anyone watching from shore must have thought the skipper was drunk such was my zig-zag course.  But I found Rodham without further mishap and tied up with a buoy out to stern alongside three other boats.  I was surprised.  Three boats makes Rodham busy in the season and it wasn't even June yet.  As I suspected the shop was closed up with no sign of the good looking Swedish lady and her daughters, so it was going to be reheated chilli for dinner tonight - for the third time.  But with a glass or two of wine I don't really know what I'm eating so what the hell.  No, don't get the wrong idea.  It's my taste buds you see, they've deserted me, although I can tell when the milk's off, as it was when I had a brew.  Now, I had some dried milk powder somewhere.  When I found it it was pretty solid having given up the pretence of being powder during the long winter, but a few minutes attention with a hammer and chisel soon sorted that out.

So, first (short) leg accomplished and I was on my way. A pleasant chat to two locals who had a summer home on a nearby island and who had come to Rodham to drink coffee from a thermos and plastic cups passed a pleasant few minutes and they told me of another attractive island a few miles away on my route to Helsinki. Getting into the stride of things here!  I'll visit that tomorrow.