Final stage 5 summary

Post date: Sep 14, 2015 12:17:24 PM

As expected, this was the easiest stage of the lot. I only had a couple of tough sails and nothing went wrong except for my autopilot misbehaving occasionally.

This stage consisted of the most passages - 15 in all. So many of them were short, lasting only a few hours. This gave me the opportunity to explore many harbours and coastal towns which I enjoyed enormously. I especially took advantage of the light winds while I was in the Solent and so spent quite a few days hanging around there. I cycled around the Isle of Wight and saw all the maritime museum pieces in Portsmouth amongst other explorations.

Maybe because it was warm or maybe because I was in familiar territory, but I think it's the stage I enjoyed most in terms of the scenery and my coastal discovery days. They say that the west coast of Scotland is unbeatable. There's no doubt it was spectacular, but the fact is that when I was up there the weather was pretty dire and it was still cold which did put a dampener on things. However, the white cliffs on the south-east are truly fantastic and I got to see them thoroughly from both the sea and on land. I guess we're all quite familiar with them which reduces the impact. I cycled 250 miles during this stage which is far more than any other stage and this reflects the fact that I simply got to see more stuff.

I had quite a few nice sunny days and, comparatively, it was warm. I never had to wrap up in a ridiculous number of layers and my sleeping cabin never got damp so I slept dry - luxury.

I made a special effort of avoiding the motor as much as possible and have succeeded in bring my motoring proportion for the total venture down to 30% which was a target I really wanted to hit. So I'm very pleased about that.

I'll blog separately to wrap up the venture as a whole but with this stage over, my work is done.