Jojac came out of the water today. I cleaned her off, touched up the waterline, replaced the anode and checked that the the rope round the prop the other day had done no damage. She was back in by 1145 but the lock had closed for the day though so I will leave on tomorrow's tide around 0800. I thought I would go to the Fishing Heritage Centre this afternoon - guess what, it's closed on Mondays. This is developing into a pattern; the Shotley HMS Ganges museum only opens Saturdays, the Harwich lifeboat museum on Wednesdays, and I was there on a Tuesday .....

Last night I had a bit of a first. Someone came aboard about 10 pm. There was a bit if a racket from the cockpit and when I went to look there was a fox, bold as brass, pulling my anchoring gloves out of a cubbyhole. He was very unperturbed and only wandered off after some stern words - after all, I said, you don't look old enough to be out this late, haven't you got a home to go to? He wandered onto the boat next door at which point I got the rather grainy photo below.

Tomorrow I will set off for Yorkshire, where I am led to believe wolves still roam, so I hope for even more excitement.

Just out of interest I have now completed 740 miles since leaving home. Allowing for getting in and out of ports I probably have 450 miles to run to Invernes. I managed 210 miles last week, but had a day off in Harwich and have been weather-bound here for two days as well. If the weather holds and I can make progress every day from Tuesday onwards I can just get to Inverness by the 11th which is when Janet starts her hols.

Aldo vaguely interesting is that I have done 140 engine hours. In a car, allowing say 50 mph overall to cover town and motorway driving, that would be 7,000 miles. So I've done just over a tenth of that - but used about the same amount of fuel! It would be nice to have some wind that's going my way for a change. So far it has all been on the nose or non-existent.

Rather a busy day today, although still in Grimsby. Jojac is going to be lifted out tomorrow for some routine maintenance below the waterline, and I've spent most of today doing other maintenance and repairs around the boat. I also managed to get to Cleethorpes on the bus. Cleethorpes is even more of a traditional seaside town than Teignmouth or Torquay, complete with donkey rides on the beach and a little road train covered in hanging baskets.

In this final picture you get a feel for how wide the Humber is and just how much is sand. The small object on the horizon just above the man in red is in fact a ship - you need a magnifying glass to see it. The sand goes out for miles and miles. The lifeboat spends a lot of its time rescuing people who've been cut off by the tide. Also in this pic are two small blobs on the horizon either side of the photo. They are forts, built in WW1 to protect the Humber. During WW2 they stretched nets right across to stop the Germans getting in with submarines. Dodgy chaps, foreigners.

I will probably stay here tomorrow as I will miss the lock opening in the morning. It is open 2 hours either side of high water only. So Tuesday I hope to head off for Scarborough or Whitby. Fingers crossed for the weather.

Spelling and typos corrected 29/6! Probably missed some though. I was obviously tired.

Last night I anchored off Cromer in Norfolk. It seemed far less grand than I remember from when I went there as a teenager. I had a great day from Lowestoft, lovely and sunny, lots of seals, but the distance from Lowestoft to the Humber was too far to do in one go. So I only did 40 miles yesterday and another 70 today. Last night's stop allowed me to eat something - I had exactly 7 minutes when the tide was slack in which to heat up a tin of squirrel soup.  The rest of the time it was too rolly. I got few hours kip too, and set off at 5 for the Humber, which is where I am now. I'm in the old fish dock,  which is exactly what says. Here's my view from the wheelhouse.  Note rain on window.....

Yes, it rained. And the wind! It blew uo to a force 5 which may not seem much but I have discovered the North Sea reacts badly to wind. Much more so than the deeper waters at home. So it built up some nasty waves, helped by the tides which also love the shallow bits here. End result was the worst,  most uncomfortable,  and prolonged harbour entry I have ever experienced.  And the headlands are only sand dunes offering no protection,  and five miles into the Humber I might as well have been in the open sea.  We were rolled more than when we came from Ramsgate, which Janet, Hannah and Alex will tell you, was like a faulty roller coaster but without the option of getting off. Anyway,  I made it after 12 and a half hours. The wind blew up again just as I came into the dock (the entrance to which was made invisible by the rain, but the lock keeper guided me in by radio.). All the flogging in the wind undid one of the jib sheets,  which are rigged so they can't get under the boat. But once the knot has shaken loose ..... so I had a rope round the prop just as I was trying to turn in space just 10 feet longer than Jojac.  Hurrah for the rope cutter,  which is fitted to the prop shaft. Expensive, but reassuringly so. 

This place is privately owned by the Humber Cruising Association,  and a chap has just come over to tell me the bar is open. So that's it for tonight.

Arrived in Lowestoft this evening after a bit of a rolling, bouncing trip from Harwich. The North Sea seems quite uncomfortable at times, with sandbanks, wind farms and - from here on - gas and oil rigs all clogging it up.

 I have stopped off in the small yacht basin owned by the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club. Quute pleasant, and with a restaurant and bar too.

Tomorrow I plan to keep going north towards the Humber.

I arrived in Shotley, Suffolk, last night about 9pm after an 11 hour passage from Chatham. Shotley is part of the Harwich ports area which includes Harwich itself and Felixstowe; the port is one of the largest in Europe. Shotley is the site of what used to HMS Ganges, a training establishment for boys joining the navy at 14. The iconic mast still stands although it is looking a bit worse for wear, as you can see from the photo. Google map coordinates are 51.960258, 1.276864

On the way out of Chatham, at a place called Hoo, I took the picture of the blue and white small ship below. Underneath all that superstructure is the hull of HMS Grey Goose, one of the steam gunboat flotilla that Peter Scott commanded and in which my dad served during the war.

I took a couple of pix of a container ship over on the other bank, one by night and one by day. The Felixstowe waterfront is impressive in the dark and never stops working.

Today I went over to Harwich, which is in Essex - the little ferry claims the distinction of being the only one in the world that connects Essex and Suffolk. The marketing people must have been struggling.

I spent the morning in historic Harwich, so historic that it has no shops, just lots of museums (all closed). But nonetheless it is an interesting place and well worth the stop over.

Tomorrow I plan to head up the coast towards Lowestoft or Great Yarmouth.

A bit of a catch up today as we have a better wireless signal here than in London. Arrived in Chatham yesterday evening after a glorious passage from St Katerine Docks. no wind, but flat calm. Passed a group of seals basking on the sandbanks at Blyth, just before Sheerness. They were just sunbathing, occasionally raising their heads for a general look round, and maybe the odd flipper movement which seemed to be beckoning a waiter to bring them another Margarita.

Today was a tourist day so we walked to Rochester and explored the castle. Janet made it to the top in a moment of madness brought on by the sun, which has been unbelievable. The pic below shows just how happy she was to be back on terra firma. Sadly, Janet has had to start the journey home so I am single-handed again until Scotland, when she will join me again.

Rochester was where Charles Dickens lived for a while in later life. He was born in Portsmouth, so naval dockyards must have been his thing. Much of Rochester now lives off his memory and many places have adopted awful names based on the books. We accidentally slipped into a bit of a time and space warp in "Tiny Tim's Tearooms". On the plus side, the tea and cakes were good. Sadly we didn't get a photo and my ability with words is inadequate to describe it fully. You really need to go there.

I got a few pics of London yesterday, which follow. The night before we left, we walked through Wapping and went to the famous Prospect of Whitby pub where pirates used to hang out (literally, as legend claims it was the site if some executions). It was interesting to compare the decline of two major maritime centres: the East End docks, of which Wapping is a part, where money has since flowed in to build luxury apartments a £2Million a pop, and then Chatham, where the navy employed 10,000 people and the docks here have been replaced an "outlet village". Nuff said. Rochester was nicer. 

Tomorrow I plan to head north to Essex. Kent has proved to be an interesting experience - wonder how Essex will compare?

Here are the London photos.

Leaving London tomorrow on the morning tide. Lots of good photos but they're on Janet's camera which is a Sony and entirely incompatible with anything else. Never mind. Last night we saw the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower, and had supper in the Yeoman Warders' Club. A night to remember,  and the reason we brought Jojac up here. Tonight we walked through Wapping to the Prospect of Whitby pub, very famous for pirates and also because it was the landing place of the first fuchsia to arrive in England.




Tomorrow we plan to end up at either Gillingham or Chatham,  from where Janet will start her journey home while Jojac and I carry on up the east coast. I'm aiming for Inverness in three weeks.

Here we are in London at St Katherine Dock, just yards from Tower Bridge. Jojac isn't quute the smallest boat here but there are some much, much bigger than us. But we are in good company: old Thames barges, as in the picture, the Queen's jubilee barge Gloriana, and Havengore which carried Winston Churchill's coffin at his state funeral.

 The trip round from Ramsgate was interesting, and after the foul seas rounding North Foreland we were rewarded with a very rough night in the river Swale, opposite Southend. Sunday was even windier but after a bouncy start we were in the Thames and things improved. The final 20 miles were great, passing Gravesend (where Pocahontas died), then Greenwich and the meridian,  the Thames barrier, then round Canary Wharf  and finally up to Tower Bridge and through the lock into the dock.

Today has been rest (us) and repair (Jojac). I needed some bits of hardware and the only chandlery (boat hardware shop) was in Shaftesbury Avenue,  right in the middle of theatre land. Bizarre, but they had what I needed.

No pix today as we're on a buoy in the Medway, with limited connection.  Rounded North Foreland this morning,  rather rough. Janet, Hannah and Alex all coped admirably and no-one chucked up, although there were some close calls. We plan to do the final 45 miles up to London tomorrow and be tucked up at St Katherine by evening.

A bit of spare time today which is nice. Arrived in Ramsgate yesterday afternoon after a very smooth crossing - the photo shows a ship just passing ahead in the lanes in the Dover Straight, and you can see the sea is pretty flat.

I am writing this in the comfort of the Royal Temple Yacht Club in Ramsgate, overlooking the harbour - photos of both below:

And here are some photos from Dieppe and Boulogne; Boulogne first; not much to see there apart from flats, whereas Dieppe had a very prominent church lit up at night. The photo of the sea is just to show how unbelievably flat it was between Dieppe and Boulogne.

And finally, the wonderful vessel below was in Ouistreham as we came out on the 7th. She is the Norge, the Royal Yacht of the King of Norway. Now that's class. Good to see a country that maintains some standards and understands that cost cutting is not necessarily the answer to a maiden's prayer. Let us not forget that the Blair government was responsible for the decision not to replace Britannia (but didn't make that public in its manifesto for the 1997 election). Messrs Blair and Brown were such nice chaps, it must have been an oversight.

Tonight I am in Boulogne after an eleven hour passage from Dieppe, into where I went last night with another boat in tow. She had broken the bolts holding her gearbox to her propeller shaft and Jojac towed her the 12 miles that she still had to go to Dieppe. When she called me up on the VHF she was about a mile away and I couldn't see here because of fog. A few minutes earlier we had thunder and lightning and amazing rain, and as the rain hit the sea it evaporated and made the fog. Awesome. For those of a technical bent, the two boats together weighed 17 tons and we still made over 5 knots at normal cruising revs. You wouldn't get that in a Beneteau.

Boulogne has a fishy smell and lots of flats. It might look different in the morning and may be much more attractive than it seems.

Dieppe was sort of pretty but the first shops I came to were a Cash Converters and Cartridge World so you can see why it is twinned with Newhaven, if you have ever been there. I expect there must be a French edition of the Crap Towns book; if not, there's  a business idea for someone.

No photos today as I'm a bit pushed for time. I left Caen on Saturday and went to Le Havre, then from there to Fecamp, which I am about to leave for Dieppe. Aiming to go to Boulogne tomorrow then across to Ramsgate and the Thames.

Fecamp is the home of Benedictine liquer - you can see the monastery from here - but I won't be able to sample it this trip. I really need two nights in each pace to give a day of sightseeing, but ajust don't have the time.

The coast along here is very similar to Dorset, with limestone features similar to Durdle Door and Old Harry rocks. They have evidently had major landslips and cliff falls just like at home, but without the railway to worry about.

Sun is just coming out - need to be off!

D-Day and the Navy has arrived! Two of the University training vessels are in the dock here along with a Danish minehunter, which came in at 4 this morning.

Yesterday I went to Pegasus bridge, which was absolutely heaving - impossible to move. The atmosphere was amazing though.

 Tomorrow there will be a mad dash for the bridges and the sea lock at Ouistreham which will be fun!

Warm and muggy here in Caen, and increased security in advance of the 6th. Looks like our plan to eat in the cafe at Pegasus bridge will be scuppered by new security regulations about movement up or down the canal. A UK boat that came in today reported being searched below the waterline by divers.  The weather for some of the coming weekend doesn't look promising for my schedule, with east winds which would be right on the nose,  and not pleasant. I have quite a tight deadline to reach Essex for the 12th, so I may have to rethink that part of the plan . I may end up stopping at Ramsgste and going up the Thames from there, rather than from Maldon as planned. For those joining me for the Thames - don't pre book your train tickets!