It’s hard to believe that after all these months of planning and preparation we’re actually underway.

Not a great day for sailing - very little wind and what there was was bang on the nose. So we motored / motor sailed. However, if we thought we had it bad it was nothing compared with the boats we passed by St Albans Head. They were heading back the other way, but racing. That meant they couldn’t use their engines so were doing very little more than drifting with the tide.

We made a short stop to anchor in Lulworth Cove. It was surprisingly crowded (to us) and the holding wasn’t great. After a quick look around, we decided to move on to Portland as we still had some complementary nights valid there, courtesy of Dean and Readyhoff from our time at Haslar.

In Portland we walked up to the Cove House at the south end of Chesil Beach. It’s a pub we’d been to a couple of times before and seen flooded on the news during the winter storms. The pub’s fully open now - the repair work to the shingle bar was still very much in progress.