Cornish delight

Tuesday 24 March 2020: a date that had been in my diary for some time. Following a half winter extension to my 2019 sailing season – which had included sails on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day – my Contessa 32 Songbird had been laid up at Freshwater Boatyard, St Mawes since early January. Pretty much all of the jobs - the planned ones and the unexpected – were done, and the predicted 4.9 metre high tide was all that we needed to start another season. But it was perhaps naive of me to allow myself to get excited about it as, in doing so, I was ignoring the growing threat of Covid-19 and how much it would affect our lives. Sure enough, the day before the scheduled launch, the Prime Minister announced the first lockdown and Songbird remained ashore.

I realise that this might sound somewhat melodramatic now but over the following couple of months I sometimes wondered if I would ever go sailing again. So perhaps that was the reason why, after the lockdown was eased, I was particularly keen to get afloat as often as I could. I had to wait a bit longer, however, as Mr Johnson clearly hadn’t consulted the tide tables and it was another ten days before Songbird could be