Well a fine day to go nowhere, weather forecast is a gale warning, 30 to 40 knots down the channel and it is raining cats and dogs. We are holed up in Brighton and I think the answer to that question asked in that famous song, was an easy one to answer. Should I go or should I stay?

Stay it is. If we can brave the weather we might just wander into town. To quote Tom Cunliffe's pilot guide. The town centre of Brighton, is now said to be, the 'Gay Capital of the Europe' but if that does not secure your interest, there are the famous Pavilion and Lanes. It even says there is a Hypermarket, next to the marina, where you could stock for a circumnavigation. Please don't tell Veronica. Also, of amusement in the pilot guide is that the shower block has unisex showers plus dedicated men's and women's showers for the shy. It even has, for the more adventurous ablutionist, double showers. Well is sounds like there is plenty to do here to while away a gale?

Meantime, back to day one, which was an eventful start to a 4 month cruise. The wind was 15 to 25 knots and after a lot of messing around to find the right sail plan, as the wind was building all the time, we ended up with 2 reefs in the main and sailing on the staysail. The sea state was awkward, on the stern quarter and short and steep, although not to big. This made for a lot of helming to avoid constant corkscrew action.

The day was punctuated by two "incidents" the linkage on the starboard rudder unscrewed, disabling that helm and the autopilot. The boat was on auto pilot and gibed before we realised what was going on. Anyway, what it said "on the can" for this Jeffa steering system, planned out, there is redundancy and the other helm continued to steer both rudders. I thought the linkage had snapped but after inspection and a decision not to try to fix it at sea, the only explanation seems that the linkage had never been screwed on properly in the first place and as none of the threads were stripped it must have been holding by one or two threads. All sorted in port last night thanks with great help from Marc.

The wind dropped in the late afternoon and we had a very pleasant sail, hand steering for the last 3 hours. Our arrival in Brighton was interesting. For reasons I still don't understand, reverse did not engage, possibly because of a feathering prop issue, it is working now. Note to self, when entering a marina, kick the boat into reverse before going down a blind finger berth. We tee-boned the jetty, thankfully not another boat and thankfully the boat is aluminium, so a very minor dent.

Veronica, seems to have satisfied her "bedding" fetish and made some excellent zero carb seed bread in the oven.......but I will leave her to blog about that girly stuff.