Another glorious evening sail

It's just over 3 weeks to the Cross Channel trip and John hasn't been able to get aboard this year, save the day when the forestay was broken and we had to jump on Jelly Bean.  He really needed to shake off the rust before the big trip so we put a plan together to go for an evening sail.
The tides in Poole are pretty friendly,  there is only a short time, about 90 mins either side of the low low when I can get off the mooring.  Unfortunately last nights low was at 5pm so that ate into our limited sailing time.
We climbed aboard at 6:30pm and were underway in no time at all.    We could see some activity on Arjens Keel boat so sailed in that Direction to see what was going on... Nothing sinister, he was just have some help to move it to another mooring.

We had a great sail around the islands,  beating our way against the tide across the harbour entrance, then continued our tack fest around South Deep.  There was a good breeze, force four, gusting to Six from the West, with a little bit of north for the first hour or so.  Despite the occasional rounding up, we managed to keep full main and genoa up, there's plenty of rail ballast with John and me on board :)   

Coming out of South deep put the wind on our beam and gradually behind, giving us time to relax from the constant tacking.    The sun was starting to set and our speed was good, the wind had stopped gusting and had settled to a three or four; sometimes you feel life just can't get any better.
We picked up the mooring under sail on the first pass.  We'd had a marvelous evening and were even back home by 10pm.