Having sold Dodo’s Delight, there were varied voyages in other peoples’ boats. First a ‘delivery trip’, or at least helping the new owner Gareth with the old owner John, sail T-Bird from Loch Etive to Stornoway. The boat was decrepit, and bits kept giving up, but she sailed quite well and there was enough battery power to start the engine when needed. We made it to Stornoway. The journey home via Ullapool, Inverness, Fort William and Ballachulish was almost more adventurous than the delivery trip.
Next came a visit in Guy’s boat to the highly successful RCC Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Meet in Oban before going south to London and the Greenwich Yacht Club for the inauguration of Novara One Planet in its new environmental research role. This included visits to Chatham Dockyard, viewing old boats and the incredibly long rope making shed, and the Greenwich Museum, standing a foot either side of the Greenwich Meridian (a reminder of having sailed from one foot to the other round the world in the 1990s), and studying Harrison’s revolutionary chronometers. This before dropping down to Southampton to visit Novara herself, but without masts which were under repair.
From there it was all the way back to Stornoway by train and plane to help Guy sail his boat from Stornoway down to the Solent. Frisky weather in Scotland; a heat wave along the south coast. But Stornoway to Solent successfully solved!