Many of you will know we have been considering investing in a catamaran for several years now and a few weeks ago an opportunity was presented to us when Luke Petis put his blyth 33 up for sale in Weymouth. We viewed her before Christmas and finalised the purchase the other day after viewing her out of the water. As luck would have it the weather came right just a day or so later and so myself, Stacey and dad headed back down to Weymouth to bring her back the following day. We met look and loaded the boat up along with trying to familiarise our selves with  the boat a little. Luke kindly arranged for us to stay the night in the sailors return, (which I wont) where we got a small amount of sleep before heading down to the boat at 5am the next morning. It looked as though we were lucky enough to have the tides in our favour as well as the weather so we left Weymouth harbour in the dark and headed the bows of the blyth to the east as we started the long journey home. We took at slowely at first just trundling along at 8knts or so as we had been warned about the pots to the east of Weymouth. Dawn broke as we were around st. abs head and with good visibility we opened up the engines which put the speed up to 16-18 knts average. By now the isle of Wight was beginning to appear on the horizon. we had to decide whether to head north of it around the Solent where it would be calmer but 5 miles further or south of it around st.catherines point where it would be shorter but there weren’t many places to hide. With the weather and tides on our side we decided to go to the south of the island. This gave us some fantastic views of the needles and ventnor along with a good push from the tide. There were some fair overfalls around st. catherines deep and the blyth performed very well through these seas. This is where she topped out on her speed at just over 22knots at cruising revs which indicates just how much tide there was. There were several parts of the journey after this where we hit over 20knts but this remained the fastest. The eastern end of the solent presented us with several anchored and moving ships to negotiate, this was no problem with plenty of speed and power but a good reason to stay alert.  As we got off of selsey bill there were several birds around and we passed a good load working hard with gannets and all sorts going in. we were just a couple of hundred yards away from them and I was keen to coble together some tackle and go through them. Dad wasn’t entertaining this idea as we had to make the most of the tide to keep our journey as short as possible. Of coarse he was right but I still think one drift through wouldn’t have hurt.  By now the rampion wind farm was in our sights and we decided to skirt just to the south of it. This took us right over the wreck that my brother lee and I fished on the Orkney a couple of years ago.  We carried on towards beachy head and this is the point when we started to loose the tide. By now high tide was nearly upon us and we wanted to make it around beachy head in time to get the ebb tide as we continued eastwards. As luck would have it our timing was good and we soon had the tide helping us on our way again.  we passed the royal sovereign shoals and saw our first angling boat of the day. It looked like a private boat and he swung a fish aboard as we passed although I couldn’t see what.  We now had plenty of tide behind us and were pushing over 20knots as we passed Dungeness. We spotted a trawler from mersea who Stacey text no doubt confusing him a little. As we approached dover there were two boats patrolling the border which I have never seen before. They didn’t trouble us at all andwe were soon flying passed the entrance to dover harbour. As we did so a ship was leaving and cut fairly close to us. I hope you can make out the birds diving in behind it which indicated the vast amounts of sprats there were showing at this end of the channel.  South foreland and st. Margret’s bay looked very nice although we were surprised to see snow on the top of the cliffs! There was an angling boat fishing  in st. Margret’s bay  but it didn’t look very busy. Ramsgate was now in our sights and we made our way up inside the Goodwin sands. It was flat calm although a but damp with mizzle in the air (presumably falling as snow on the land). We passed north foreland and up to the fishermans gat by dusk. Now we were back on home territory and from the gat to home we would have to push the tide. She still made good speed must of the way as we could cut across the tide although our worst speed was towards the mouth of the black water. It was now very dark and the tide was heaving out which knocked our speed down to under 14 knts at times. Once we were in the river this soon picked up again though. It didn’t take long before we were back on the mooring and we were surprised by how quickly she had made the passage. 12hrs 50 minutes from dropping the ropes in Weymouth to picking up the mooring in mersea. She averaged over 16 knots and burned nearly  half her capacity of diesel in the 206 nautical miles. Stacey took the helm for a lot of the journey with myself and dad doing a couple of short stints in between cleaning the windows, eating and drinking tea. The blyth will be coming out of the water for a few months now in order for us to make some alterations.  So we will still be fishing on the beastly evolution for a while yet and hopefully we will swap over later in the spring. There are plenty of spaces before hand and very few fish are caught from the sofa so make the most of any weather windows and get out fishing somewhere.