Xilion Rose

After a tremendous weekend in Bristol Floating Harbour celebrating Malcolm’s 66th birthday with visiting friends and family, we prepared ourselves for the crossing to the Sharpness and Gloucester Canal. This journey is in two parts, the first part is to leave Bristol at two and half hours before high tide and go down the River Avon to Avonmouth and then a dash along the coast to Portishead Marina lock, there to moor overnight and get ready for the main part of the Journey, the 24 miles from Portishead to Sharpness.
Monday dawned as a cloudy and windy day, and it was no big surprise to find that the Pilot said “not today”, but he expected that the weather would be OK to do the Portishead section on the following day. Tuesday arrived with a bit of a wind blowing, but we were given the OK from our Pilot to make the trip to Portishead, unfortunately,  by this time, Judith had to dash back home to Guildford due to a family crisis, however, as Rob was going to stay and look after their N/B “Pyrford Explorer”, he decided to join Xilion Rose just for the trip to Portishead and then Bus back to Bristol.
At 9.30.am Tuesday, we, together with Martin on his N/B “Doinmein” and John and Sandy on “D’accord” arrived at the Bristol Lock, in readiness for the mid tide. At 10.00 am we were released and made our way down the Avon, passing under the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge and then the massive M5 Motorway Bridge. We arrived at Avonmouth and then made the 1 ½ mile crossing to Portishead which was much rougher than we expected.
We again said goodbye to Rob and settled down to ready the boat for the crossing the following day. After a fretful night with the wind howling around Portishead Marina we fully expected that Bill (our  Pilot) would tell us that it was to rough for the crossing, BUT, as the wind was from the west, he said we would go (Gulp!).    He had arranged that we would be in the first lock out of the Marina at 7.45am where he (plus another Pilot for Martin and John) would meet us at  8.00 am, with Bill at the helm, off we went.  Well, for the first 20 minutes, if Annie could have abandoned ship she would have, this part of the crossing was very rough, but we were assured by Bill that as soon as we were close to the sand banks and rock’s, it would smooth out and everything would be OK, which proved to be the case, so we settled down to enjoy the experience. After passing under the two Seven Bridges I checked my GPS hand held unit and found that we were travelling at 14.8 mph, we were going with an 11 mph tide and just cruising at 3.8 mph as far as Xilion Rose was concerned, we finally arrived at Sharpness on schedule, where we said goodbye to Bill, and were eventually locked on to the Sharpness Canal.

Malcolm and Annie

Xilion Rose at Sea (Well, the Bristol Channel)

Bill (our Pilot) at the helm leaving Portishead Lock