We travelled to Portsmouth by mini bus; the ride felt like years. We walked to the ships and then formed a kind of human chain, passing the bags from person to person until we got to the last person’s bag onboard.

Afterwards, we went to find lunch, which was difficult to find since some of our favourite venues were closed. We did, however, get to try out a variety of different cultured foods.  

The watches both had their go of going upstairs on deck, where we learnt the terminology of the equipment and below deck, where we learnt how to use the toilets and kitchen. The toilets had to be pumped 40 times overall and no tissues are allowed to be flushed down , but put into plastic bags instead!

After this, we got ready to sail. We sailed into the sea and afterwards stopped the boat with the fenders, washed up and slept for the next day.

Today we went from Cowes to Poole. For the first time we put up the Mainsail and it took all 14 of us, excluding the Skipper and the Watch Leader. It took a lot of effort to sweat the sails, which involved us pulling up the Mainsail with the rope. The more progress we made, the heavier it got. Some of us were also turning the winch in the snake pit to help holst the sail. Eventually, we had all three sails up, which gave us a lot of speed that helped us to reach our destination in a few hours. As the wind was coming from in front, we had to tack. This meant that the crew needed to work the winches. For lunch, we had sandwiches and plenty of tasty crisps.

Before long, we arrived in Poole, which was nice because there were plenty of motorbikes as it was a show off night. We saw plenty of different models and variations of the bikes. We also found plenty of souvenirs for our parents, there was a plethora of gifts for us to choose from which made it harder to buy just one thing.

We then took a walk across the beach where we did lots of rock skipping and seashell hunting, also we found multiple dead jellyfish, which were cool to see. For dinner, we had tasty Bolognese made by the lovely crew, while we explored Poole. Poole harbour also had very nice showers!

After Poole, we started our journey to Weymouth. The winds were very weak and the tides was against us, however the sea was smooth. We had the engine, so we were still able to travel quite fast. Plenty of us steered the boat and we felt like good pirates. We also saw plenty of ships that looked like pirate ships. After sailing for a while, we did a Spinnaker pole climb over the sea and it was fun and thrilling. The fastest time was 14 seconds, but everyone that did it enjoyed the rush of adrenaline. After this, we also saw dolphins who were called David and Graham.

Once we arrived in Weymouth, we did a lot of exploring. Our first impression was that it was a little retirement village, but there was still plenty to do. We first got ice-cream, which tasty. Then we went to the fair. Possibly the highlight of our day as we first did the bumper cars, and got bumped countless times. We also tried out different rides, one was called surfs up.

Afterwards, we went to the beach and the sand was really nice and very fine. We saw sand sculptures and also went into the sea for a short amount of time.

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