Sailing with HOEOCA

I’ve just got back from a fabulous four days away sailing with HOEOCA (Heart of England Offshore Cruising Association).  When I first got interested in sailing I found the club through an internet search and after realising that they met each month at my local pub in the village, went down to meet them.  They invited membership which I decided at that time, for whatever reason not to persue.  However, through my twitter activity a couple of years later I met Richard Horswill AKA @racesail who, after about a month of tweeting I realised lived in the same village as me!  We arranged a tweetup (twitter friends meeting) at the Brickmakers Arms which quickly decended into a bit of a booze up.  After a couple of other meets in the Brickies Richard dropped the Kings shilling into the bottom of my glass and lightened my wallet with a deposit for the weekend we’ve just had.

The initial plan was for a crossing to Cherbourg, but the weather man clearly had different ideas so the revised plan was to head west to Poole.  As the weather forecast deteriorated we again revised that plan and decided that we’d be more sensible to stay in the Solent and so on the first day ended up in Lymington for lunch where we met up with another twitterer @PRPeta for a mid afternoon OJ.  Friday morning saw us take a pleasant sail back down to Cowes but the weather was pushing in from the south west and the wind building so we went to start the engine and motor into Cowes Yacht Haven.  Unfortunately the engine failed to start, which was traced back to the electronic black box shortly after, and so we sailed onto a bouy picking it up at first attempt to try and diagnose the problem. Despite having two engineers on board, because of the nature of the fault we were unable to resolve it and had to be towed back to the marina by Sea Start who were very good.

Saturday, because of the weather, turned into a shopping and pub day until the evening when we took a mini bus to Yarmouth for the HOEOCA November Rally Dinner.  I’ll not publish photo’s here to avoid embarrassment but it was a fancy dress theme of Angel & Demons and so the crew of our boat went dressed as transvestite angels….. not my idea you understand, but terrific fun.

During the weekend each of the crew contributed money to a kitty for provisions, meals out and the occasional drink and at the end of the weekend there was a small sum left over.  As HOEOCA has chosen as its charity to support this year is toe in the water, the balance of the kitty will be sent to them for the excellent work that they do with injured soldiers.Technorati Tags: HOEOCA, Sailing

Tagged as: HOEOCA, sailing