Great gig Saturday night, but three songs from the end the fire alarm went off and the entire buildings was evacuated to the car-park. Although I was certain it was a false alarm, the DJ had been over enthusiastic with his smoke machine, there was still a degree of trepidation at leaving my guitar in the building. I very nearly took it with me, but the last time a fire alarm went off at a gig, I did just that as we evacuated out the back fire escape, only to find it wasn't a fire, but a small scale riot happening in the pub car-park. Small scale, but enthusiastic, complete with riot vans and irate policemen and a very large number of drunken Foresters, it being Cinderford in the Forest of Dean.
Having our guitars with us was a definite disadvantage, so they were passed back over the heads of the folks crowding out behind us until they were safe back on stage, then the band fought and scrabbled our way back into the building through the squabbling masses. It's never a dull life.
Sunday morning, first in the catalogue of calamity that was to follow was the chart plotting app on my Sony Xperia tablet. It had automatically updated, and in doing so, an apparent "change in privileges" had caused it to eat my charts. I found fix instructions for it on the Internet, but didn't have the time to follow them to their (hopefully, though yet to be determined) happy conclusion before I had to leave to pick up Dad on the way to the Marina if we were to make the tide.
So I activated a trial copy of Navionics, which is a vector based plotting app that Dad favours. It did the job of telling me where I was, but I've decided I'm definitely not a fan of vector charts. I hate that when you zoom out to get a picture of where you are in relation to everything, you loose the detail of what you're potentially running into.
On getting to the Marina, we walked out to the sea wall and looked at the waters beyond. A northerly F4 was blowing, and we could see white caps out in the Kings Road along wiht a couple of large vessels being maneouvored about by tugs out of Portbury as well. We debated whether or not to go out, and concluded we'd survived worse. At 1120 we slipped our berth and entered the lock with a couple of other outbound craft.
A short while later, we were motoring out past the breakwater. I was on the port side pulling in fenders as we passed the end of it when there was a thump of something heavy landing on the deck, something grabbed and jerked me then there was a twang. Too bemused to be startled, I stared in complete incomprehension at a large angler's fishing weight now sat mutely on the coach-house roof. Then followed the tangle of bright yellow fishing line now collected in a birdsnest around the fender in my hand, along the way passing my dispassionate eye over a nasty, inch long, barbed fishing hook that had caught me through the webbing of my life jacket harness.
I looked back, and could see a bemused angler on the end of the breakwater, his own couple of rods seemingly undisturbed. I don't know if he was the angler that had caught me, or if it had been somebody else. I don't know if the back-eddy had driven us unwittingly into an angler's fishing line, or if somebody had misjudged that we'd passed and accidently cast into us. I do know it could've been an awful lot worse. I cut the line, gathered it all up along with the weight, and went below to find some wire cutters to cut the vicious hook out of the webbing of my harness.
A lucky escape, I reckon.
Equilibrium restored, I returned to the deck, finished pulling in the fenders and stowing the mooring lines, then Dad put Calstar head to wind and we hauled up the sails. I left the first reef in the main, but let out the whole genoa to begin with. The little boat heeled hard in the gusts on her beam reach towards Denny Island, so I pulled a few turns of the genoa back in and she seemed to settle well enough, Dad still on the helm so that I could concentrate on the management of the boat.
An hour later we tore through the leach of the headsail.
So it was a perilous weekend. But it had been great fun sailing up until then, regardless.
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