Author: Margaret Pendzich

Our friend, Karen, who has sailed with us before met us in Lymington on Saturday evening to join us during the Summer Bank Holiday long weekend. We set out on Sunday morning, heading through the Needles with the wind, tide and current. The winds were light, the day was warm and sunny, and we had…

Lymington is my early favorite for cutest port in the UK. It has a long history of salt, smuggling, ship building and sailing  of which it is immensely proud. It was granted its first charter in 1200 so it is a very old town. The production of sea salt was important from the middle ages until the…

Over the weekend, we decided to head out of the Solent and go to Poole. This involved sailing through an area called the Needles which is a narrow channel with “shingles” (shallow, rocky area) on one side and a submerged point referred to as the Bridge on the other, both of which need to be…

It has been unseasonably cold and the weather has been a bit unsettled since a cold front moved through about four days ago. Even the Brits are complaining that it’s been cold. We have a lovely down duvet on our bed but have ended up breaking out some extra blankets the past several nights. We…

We’ve done a fair amount of sailing but one thing that we have not done much of is slow speed maneuvering around fixed objects. This includes parking Flight in a  marina and pulling her up alongside a dock. Knowing that this was a deficiency of ours, we enlisted some professional help from Commodore Yachting in…

We’ve been hanging out in Portsmouth for the past week and have been enjoying it. Flight is birthed in Gosport Marina which is just across the harbor from the Portsmouth waterfront and naval base. In fact, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier was in port and we got to see her leave…

The rich amount of history here is astounding. One of the first things we did on our trip in February was to join British Heritage. The membership gets us into many different historic sites around the country. When in Cowes a few days ago, we went to see Osborne House which was the estate of…

Right now we’re floating in Newtown Creek which is on the Isle of Wight. We arrived yesterday but the weather and the scenery were so lovely that we decided to extend for a second day. We got the dingy out today, mounted our 2.5 horsepower Yamaha outboard and toodled around the river. There are a…

We just finished the one week handover cruse with David, Flight’s previous owner. We were so busy and covered so much information that I fell into bed exhausted every evening with my brain full of information about lines and fenders and maneuvering and rigging, plus all of the systems on the boat. This boat is…