...a little late after the event, but thought I would try and document as much of the sailing season as possible!
 
Well, we planned our first sail date way back in January when the snow was thawing and we thought we'd be fairly safe planning a March sail in terms of freezing weather....hmmm. But enthusiasm made us ignore sense and come the 6th March we hooked up the boat to the trusty Volvo estate and with me, my brother Tim and my father David, we headed off to Bewl Water for our first season.
 
Most of the journey down there involved conversation that had one purpose- to clarify that we hadn't forgotten how to sail after a good 5-6months of being lland lubbers! I don't think any of us were convinced! Anyway, we arrived, set the boat up, fonud we had lost a clip that holds the hoop that the main sheet runs through. Seemed ok with a bit of bodging.
 
We had also bought some of the metal shoud adjusters for the lower shrouds (our Xenon had these for the main shrouds, but the lowers were just rope ties). The new metal adjusted were a little on the tight side as we were running these from the mounts on the side of the boat. I think for our next outing we will have the D ring on the mount, then connect the adjusters from there to give us a little more play in them.
 
It took a good 45mins or more to get the boat ready in the freezing crisp, but clear weather...so we went in for a hot drink! Well, you don't want to be cold before you've even got in the boat! We then prised ourselves from the warmth of the clubhouse galley and headed to the changing rooms where, speaking for myself (and this seems to happen every time I go sailing) my wet suit had shrunk again!! I'm siure it's nothing to do with Christmas dinners...
 
So we eventually got the boat on the water. The very cold water. Congratulated ourselves on a launched without hitch, and in the 12-15knot winds enjoyed adjusting to the boat again! We took some pictures and video footage on this run, so hopefully we should get some of that up on the website. We decided due to the temperature we wouldn't risk running the gennaker as we have only taken it out towards the end of last season and really didn't want to gamble on getting dunked in. The Xenon is an awesome boat! With 3 of us we could get quite a decent speed up and keep the boat pretty flat too. A good bit of spray as we crashed through the waves kept things exciting.  We encountered the trademark weatherhelm a couple of times when we didn't keep it quite flat, but once you get to know the Xenon you know how to correct and counter its little foibles. After about an hour we decided that it isn't easy to sail with frost bite, so we headed in for bacon rolls!...which turned into a fulll English breakfast once we had seen what was on offer!!
 
So back on the water after lunch and we decided to drop one of our 3 man team to shore so that we could get some better pictures and video from the bank. Tim jumped out to grab the camera (note AFTER getting changed into dry warrm clothes...I'm not bitter). With two in the boat it was a lot more lively. We were also keeping it close to shore so we were doing a good deal of tacking back and forth to keep her close to where Tim would be taking pics. We were only on the water 45mnins at this point and had already decided once we had a few pics we would call it a day, the fingers were now starting to hurt!
 
We got the boat in and patted each other on the back for not going in the water!! A good day's sailing!!