Bangor to Rothesay (Kames Bay)

The last thought on Bangor is, probably as you would expect, a strange one. We’ve never been to a town before where every clock in the town centre (bar the nice municipal clock tower near the marina) is either broken or showing the wrong time. Most confusing for a Captain who refuses to wear his watch “on holiday” and who consequently irritates the hell out of the bewatched crew with the “what time is it” question.  (Crew wants to know why does he want to know the time if he doesn’t want to wear a watch? She just doesn’t understand…..)

Why does Bangor have so many inoperative clocks? Does Uri Geller live here now? (Unlikely, all our spoons are just fine.) Answers to this most perplexing issue happily received.

After some more arm extending shopping, we headed off a little before high water, bound for the Clyde area. The original plan to head further North (maybe Oban) was postponed as June’s parents had to put back their holiday in Gairloch so meeting up there wasn’t “urgent”. Actually, nothing feels urgent right now… The Clyde area suited us better. We are meeting up in Edinburgh with Peter and Amanda from Australia (the lady who nearly became Patrick’s godmother) in a couple of weeks and so staying a little further south where we can leave the boat in a marina and train to Edinburgh is easier.

Another overnight passage was planned to take best advantage of the tides but to avoid “pot marker territory” in the dark. Sadly, another passage with the wind forecast to be from the North, the SW’ly prevailing winds seem to have given up this year. We are sure that we will manage a few trips without the wind and hence waves being against us. Just don’t know when that will be.

Leaving Belfast Lough, it looked quite atmospheric:

The forecast force 4 or 5 northerly wasn’t evident though! It had morphed into a westerly 4 and so was pretty much on the stern quarter for the trip across to Scotland. A little topic for the stabilisers to resolve. Not too much traffic about, bar the ferries. The P&O liner Aurora passed astern of us, looming up from the evening mist and vanishing into it like an ethereal being – just a very big one:

Patrick was busy acting as lookout for the trip. He seemed quite at home spotting the buoys / ships and waving to them frantically. He just needs some radio practice next:

Looking at his tummy, I think a diet is called for though. We will report on progress.

The latitude together with the mid-June timing meant that there were only about 3 and a half hours of real darkness on the trip. The sunset was lovely – again the camera isn’t good enough to do it justice:

We passed the famous Ailsa Craig island at about the same time as the sun was setting, along with a minehunter from the navy:

Travelling up the east side of Bute, we were called by a tug who wanted to advise us that he was pulling a barge with a 600 metre tow line. That was pretty obvious on the radar – two big radar returns moving in unison. Impressive sight at night as the tug had a searchlight trained on the barge – it looked like a section of a ship that was en route to Rosyth, taking 4 days.

Arriving in Rothesay Bay after a pretty gentle trip, we knew we were in Scotland – Calmac ferries!

As there was no good spot to anchor, we pressed on into the next bay (Kames Bay) and dropped the anchor there at about 5:30am. A lovely setting to end the journey:

For the technically minded

No maintenance items to report - just that it was nice and warm in the engine room doing the regular checks. However, the B&G depth sounder behaved itself this time when we got the depths over 100 metres. If you remember it decided to drop the leading zero once before and set off the shallow water alarm. This time it was faultless:

The 5.5 knots at 1450 rpm is slower than normal as the stabilisers were busy knocking the roll off from a reasonable sized beam sea and hence eating about .5 knots too. The 5855 nautical miles on the log is from our travels in the last 2 years since a reset. The dinky little digital gauge for the main engine tells all…..