Stuck in Lowestoft

haven't posted for a while, so i'll quickly sum up the last few days and begin again in scarborough:
After leaving on Wednesday of last week, Mum and I sailed the boat up to Ipswich to meet Candi who had been staying at our Nana's, and Dad who had to work overnight in London. The journey was mainly good, winds were pretty high, but coming from behind, which made it alot more bearable than it would otherwise have been. The sun helped too, and Mum and I both got there with burnt noses. We ran the engine all the way there, which got rid of any of our fears about the engine overheating.
We stayed at Ipswich for a couple of days and then left at about midday on Saturday to Lowestoft. This time Candi and I sailed the boat while the parent's navigated from down below. We arrived in Lowestoft after a fairly uneventful journey with a Southerly wind, at about 8 o'clock. After mooring up, we had a swim in the marina since it's open to the sea. it wasn't as cold as you might expect but cold enough. We've been here since then, the weather has mainly been predicting force sixes, so we decided to wait before making possibly our longest single stint up to Scarborough.
Today, we hired a car and drove back to essex because we had some things to do, dad picked up his new phone case and when we got back, we were about to leave. last minute change of plans and even though we'd stowed everything away, ready to sail, the decision was made to leave in the early hours of the morning, to avoid sailing through the night if possible. Looks like we're going to have to anyway tomorrow night but hopefully we'll be in the routine of watches by then and it won't be so rough.

First day

We left to make our way to Ipswich yesterday, with gale force 5-6 winds. We wanted to get to the end of the river Medway before deciding whether the sea was too rough for us to spend an 8-10 hour journey in it. When we got there, there was an imminent gale force 8 warning from the Met office and we decided to go across the Thames and anchor up for the night, where we could buy some new batteries for the boat and also look at a niggling problem with the engine's cooling system. As we reached the end of Southend pier, the niggling problem became more serious and we were forced to drop anchor further out than we'd wanted. My dad took the engine to bits for a while, looking for something that might cause it and we found that strainer on the sea water intake was full of barnacles and sand. Once we cleaned it and restarted the engine, it seemed happy enough to run without the temperature going above 90°C where it had got up to 110°C before.

After we anchored in the place we'd originally planned, I dropped Dad off with the dinghy so he could get the batteries and pick up my Mum, with the plan of picking them up on the dinghy again in an hour or two. However, after 10 minutes of being on the boat, Dad phoned me to tell me to take the boat back to Chatham on my own!

I sailed back over the Thames with the genoa and put it away at the mouth of the Medway since I didn't think I'd be able to tack up the river on my own. This turned out to be easier said than done with some heavy gusts of wind causing a real mess of the cabin below, but eventually I was motoring back to Chatham. Had some trouble with two sailing boats, who felt they'd take the 'give way to sail' ruleto its limit and forcing me right to the edge of the river before tacking back out of my way.

When I reached the lock at Chatham, Dad and Peter from Ladylove took my ropes and I was safely home. The second boat into the lock behind me was one of the sailing boats who'd forced me to the side of the river. turned out while I managed to get the boat in on my own, he and a crew of 3 or 4 couldn't and they made a right mess of things, which cheered me up a bit.

Turned out our first day ending up being more of a sea trial, but the engine problem was fixed and we now have two new domestic batteries. We'll now set off properly next Wednesday.