Falmouth to Skomer Island

We left Falmouth Sunday am for a planned trip to the Milford Haven estuary. Either to anchor up there and move on later in the week or to hide away in the marina if the nice weather got cut short (typical British summer expectation).  At least to start with it was nice enough to sit on the flybridge in the sun and watch the world slowly go bye. Mind you, we left without solving the Cornish bad teeth mystery. All suggestions welcome…

Leaving Falmouth – the castle and coastguard station:

St Mawes:

Bye to Falmouth and the lovely estuary (you can also see how little wash the Nordhavn makes when running at the hull speed – hence the fuel efficiency):

The sea really was horizontal. The crew had partaken of no alcohol and it was calm. There is no excuse….

On the way south towards the Lizard peninsular, there were 9 tankers anchored up awaiting instructions, most of them empty. Maybe we are using less oil these days?

Then, huge excitement, the first dolphin sighting of the trip. A couple came over to play (they seem to love our bow wave) but the photography didn’t do them justice. This fuzzy blurred thing is just in here to prove they existed:

For the westerly run towards Land’s End, we retired inside the pilothouse – travelling into the wind and waves so a bit fresher but still brilliant blue skies and we were able to leave the pilothouse door open.  En route the liner Independence of the Seas was slowly plodding along at 9.2 knots heading for Cork (OK faster than us but way below her normal service speed). I guess that fuel saving has also hit the cruise ship business.

Reaching Land’s End is always a milestone. For the non UK readers, it is the most south westerly part of our little island. You notice the difference in the sea state here too. You really feel the long slow Atlantic swell coming all the way from America that just gently lifts the boat up and then drops her down again. Not at all like the short steep waves you get in shallow areas such as the Solent where you push into them and throw lots of spray about. Rounding Land’s End, we had a beam sea of up to 2 metres height so the stabilisers were woken up. The crew’s ability to take landscape pictures that were horizontal got tested and was found wanting once more. The stabilisers were working fine so again, no excuse here. However, here are some of the better offerings!

Land’s End – visitor centre

Longships light house off Land’s End:

We celebrated “rounding the corner” with a typically Cornish cream tea. The run up to Wales is a 90 nautical mile jaunt, and pretty quiet compared to the English Channel. Compare this AIS picture to the one from our trip St Peter Port to Guernsey:

Almost lonely out there.

Stunning sunset and red sky, light until 10:30pm too. This picture doesn’t do it justice:

Of course, there had to be one fishing vessel that made life difficult during the night, altering course to head directly towards us when we were passing nicely astern of him. I think they enjoy baiting the private boats too much. As a fresh weather forecast said settled conditions for another couple of days, we decided to forgo the more industrial delights of Milford Haven for the bird sanctuary of Skomer island instead. The possibility of puffin spotting was too tempting. A few miles off, the Captain spotted a pair on the water though the binoculars. The crew struggled to find anything through them and then get the focus right so had to wait.

About 27 hours after leaving Falmouth we anchored, alone at first, in the South Haven of Skomer. We were surrounded by Puffins, Guillemots, Razorbills, Little Auks etc etc and had a background soundtrack of bird calls. It felt like we had arrived in a wildlife programme on TV. All that was missing was Mr Attenborough’s commentary.

Impressions of Skomer here:

Or look at http://www.welshwildlife.org/skomer-skokholm/skomer/

Lovely, lovely anchorage. Time to chill, enjoy the view, the wildlife and the sun. Patrick the real Captain was busy meanwhile checking the next course up to Holyhead and studying the pilot book for ports of refuge:

He also enjoyed chilling out in the sun, playing the cool penguin and trying to look superior to the other feathered creatures about:

As much as we enjoyed our slow meander to and through Cornwall and spending time in places we used to visit only briefly, there is a special feeling to being in new territory that was always too far away for normal holidays! Oh yes….

For the sailors:

It was a real milk run. 1.5m waves from the west for most of the journey, a bit bumpier around Lands End and wall to wall sun. My pot marker complaint of the trip centres on two little boats fishing off the Manacles who were dropping 1 litre milk containers over the side as floats. No comment. We were well inside the TSS off Lands End so quiet and were then amused to listen to Falmouth coastguard call the Independence of the Seas to say that oil pollution had been spotted by satellite and ask if they had been flushing their tanks. Bet the officer on watch called the Captain who was probably hosting a table at dinner to handle the (potentially expensive) politics behind that call! Timing the trip to do the harder bits in daylight meant we had more time with tide against us than with us. Worth the extra few litres of diesel to enter the Skomer anchorage in the daytime though and to avoid the (almost) marked pots around the Manacles.

If you haven’t been to Skomer South Haven (we hadn’t, we’d only ever been to the North Haven when we had a sea trial on a Nelson 37 from Dale many years ago) then do so… Highly recommended

For the technically minded:

Nothing to report on the engineroom front. The new oil cooler fittings were fine. Just lots of engine room checks and swapping the fuel supply to the day tank between the side storage tanks to keep her on an even keel. RPM for the trip was 1440 or so, burning the usual just under 8 litres an hour. As she is heavily laden still (technically still full of fuel as the sight gauges on the tanks are only now at the full marks!) that gave us about 5.8 knots in the sea conditions we had or 5.6 with the stabilisers working.

One oddity – as a really great leaving present from work, a kind mad Dutchman arranged some C-Map charts for our travels. The “extra extra big” one of the entire UK has been in use since February and much appreciated but the up to now 100% solid Furuno gear had a moment en route. The SD card containing the charts was in a plotter that also has an ARPA card installed (look it up if you don’t know!) and at the time was also running the route navigation and hence autopilot input. It froze up totally trying to advance a waypoint in the route – something it has done flawlessly x times before where x is a very big number. The fix was to move the chart SD card to another plotter in the system that didn’t have an ARPA card to run and wasn’t managing the course and autopilot information either.

We have 4 Furuno plotters in total (3 normally installed as the one in the aft cockpit is really for fishing or med-mooring use) and a linked navigation PC.  Seems like the workload just got too much for the poor old (6 years+) slow processor in the Furuno unit. It has been fine since and screen refreshes are running faster too. The concept of distributed computing and load sharing working in practice!