Rachel and I spent a day down in Amble earlier in the week. The sun was shining up here at Mount Pleasant so we drove down the A1 to Amble and found that the climate was Mediterranean (well just look at that sky).

Rachel hadn’t explored Amble before so we went off to look at the the tourist village made up of small boat huts selling clothes and jewelry as well as pet products and of course good things to eat. After walking along the edge of the harbour (Warkworth harbour as it served the village and castle of that name) we wandered into a fish restaurant on the harbour side and enjoyed an excellent haddock and chips.

Having eaten, we walked into the town itself and bought a picnic for the afternoon and then made our way to the marina and down to Olivebank which is tied up just at the bottom of the main gangway so there was no long walk (unlike the walks we were used to when Ianthe was kept at Inverkip).

The new outboard was working perfectly and soon we were chugging out of the marina and then the harbour on our way to the sea beyond. Rachel said that she thought that that this was her first time out in the sea as contrasted with inland or sheltered waters like the Meditarranean, the various reaches of the Clyde on the west of Scotland, or the Forth from when we sailed from Port Edgar. We noticed certainly that even on this beautiful day there is a swell on the sea once out of the shelter of the harbour.

But Olivebank handled it all like the trooper she is and it wasn’t long before we were passing boats which had paused to fish, or yachts from which folk were diving into the deep blue sea. There was loads of evidence of lobster pots and there were yacht-racing markers to be seen as well. Our route took us due east towards Coquet Island, sharing its name with the little river which runs past Warkworth, past the marina and into the harbour on its way to the sea. There is a lighthouse and a substantial house on the island but we didn’t go too close because there are rocky outfalls all around the island (not, I’m sure, that they would have bothered us as we were at the top of the tide and we draw so little. It was a spectacular day, warm, no hot, and not a lot of breeze although out from land there is always a little wind. We were testing out our new engine and it was superb. Having replaced the huge forty horse-power monster with a nine.nine four-stroke we wanted to be sure that it could cope. It certainly could and we made good progress as we journeyed around the island and made our way back to base. (The old motor was just that, old and past it — and we didn’t really want a motor other than as a reliable way of getting home if the sails let us down — or we let them down!)

So we arrived back in the marina extremely happy. It had been a grand trip and the first time that Rachel had been outside the harbour. She protests that it certainly won’t be the last!