Steve spent a final week making sure ‘Cachalot’ was ready for her passage to Dunkirk with the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships before setting off from the Tidemill Yacht Harbour on Friday 16 May, 2025.

The list of jobs was getting shorter and, as usual it was great to have a helping hand from local friends. Bev drove the campervan home on 7 May to catch up with her ballet classes, get ready for our trip to the Arctic next month and do a few jobs around the house and garden. With sails bent on and deck painted everything was nearly ready. Rick kindly let us store anything not needed for the passage on his boat and went out in the river with Steve for a quick ‘shakedown sail’. A worrying problem arose when testing the iPad integration with Navionics, the fixed VHF radio and chart plotter – there was a conflict with the GPS signal! A phonecall to the always responsive Quark-Elec Helpdesk resulted in the diagnosis of a broken receiver. A new one was promptly supplied. Sadly, it still didn’t work. Needing a Windows laptop to re-configure the software, Claudia came to the rescue and everything is working perfectly. On close examination of the old one, it seems to have suffered from water ingress/condensation . . . the new one needs to have better protection from the elements!

Friday dawned and Mark arrived from Derbyshire in plenty of time to do a last trip to the shops for fresh provisions. With high water mid-afternoon they planned to leave at 1530, motoring down to Waldringfield to spend the night on a mooring buoy. With the weather turning a bit chilly and breezy they decided to eat onboard, rather than get wet and cold going ashore to the Maybush. After a leisurely morning in the river, they set out across the bar at 1245 in light winds and not too much surf. They enjoyed the sail down to the River Orwell although Troublesome Reach lived up to its name. As it was getting quite windy, they decided to spend the night in the shelter of Suffolk Yacht Harbour with the added advantage of fish and chips at The Lightship.