Welsh thoughts and
planning the next leg
Well, not in Welsh actually as we can only manage English,
dodgy German and rusty Dutch between us. Still, we had the friendliest of
welcomes from the Holyhead Marina lady once they opened up shop on Wednesday
morning. She told us that the town itself
was a bit of a dump (typical ferry port we thought!) but that the walks around
were lovely and of course Anglesey is worth exploring too. The town’s claim to
fame? Well, it has the longest breakwater in Europe. Only you can judge the
relative importance of that….
Walking into the town centre was sad. Dull, grey and lifeless
shops but really friendly people. If we lived there, I’m not sure we could stay
as cheerful as they manage to. A strange
place – it seems that everyone just bypasses it on the way to their ferry. It
does have the most amazing bridge linking the port and railway station to the
town though. Kind of the start of a regeneration project that didn’t go any
further?
Nice retail park out of town though which gave us the chance
to walk after two days afloat, raid a big supermarket and then use a taxi to
get everything back to the boat. The Captains arms have grown by several
centimetres since he started lugging bulk shopping back from the nearest store
and the little fold up bikes are not real load carriers either. You soon learn
to buy the maximum comfortable weight of shopping on each trip when you have to
carry it. Milk and other “bulk” items get bought when there is spare payload,
not when you are running low! We have resisted the suggestion from Bob and Lin
to buy a trolley shopper though. That is really surrendering to age a little
early on….
Around the harbour there are some lovely views, and some
beautiful old houses that are now sadly derelict but look impressive from a
distance:
Closer up...
The overall impression we left with was of helpful friendly
people and lovely scenery though. That is a nice memory to carry around.
We debated long and hard our next leg of the trip. To Troon
and then the Clyde area? Or stop off in the Isle of Man? Or straight up the
west coast? Anchoring in a nice Irish bay as a journey break and then
continuing to Scotland wasn’t too sensible as the anchorages are mainly
sheltered from the prevailing SW’ly winds not the unseasonal NE’ly we have
right now.
Eventually, for many reasons, we decided to become “country
twitchers” and go for another one inside the week. Sunday, Falmouth England,
Tuesday / Thursday Skomer and Holyhead, Wales so Friday had to be Northern
Ireland. We picked Bangor as easily accessible at all tides and having a link
to Belfast too. We had great local knowledge and advice by email from Phil, the
Nordhavn Europe man as he lived in the area for many years.
For the sailors:
The crossing from Holyhead to Bangor is fun as the tidal
patterns are not simple. Picking a departure time when the tide isn’t going
across Holy Island at 3 knots that then gives a fair tide as far as possible to
Ireland is hard when you do 6 knots. We ended up planning to leave at almost
slack water, taking the stream most of the way past the Isle of Man and then
push against it for the last 3 hours or so off the coast although it would be
strong there. This gave us a planned 4pm departure on Thursday and a daylight
arrival in the new port.
For the tekkies:
Nowt, sorry. Go watch the Big Bang Theory on TV.
