About us and the boat

About us and the boat:

We were lucky enough to retire early at the start of 2013 so we could head off and "live the dream" on board our Nordhavn 47 Trawler Yacht. The idea is to see some of the planet, at a slow 6 - 7 knots pace. There are no fixed goals or timings, we just had a plan to visit Scotland and then probably the Baltic before heading south.

The idea is to visit the nicer areas in these latitudes before heading south for warmer weather. If we like somewhere, we will stay for a while. If not, we will just move on. So, for the people who love forward planning and targets, this might seem a little relaxed!

If anyone else is contemplating a trawler yacht life, maybe our experiences will be enough to make you think again, or maybe do it sooner then you intended!

The boat is called Rockland and she is built for long distance cruising and a comfortable life on board too. If you want to see more about trawler yachts and the Nordhavn 47 in particular, there is a link to the manufacturers website in our "useful stuff" section. For the technically minded, there is a little info and pictures of the boat and equipment in the same section

Regards

Richard and June

Thursday 6 June 2013

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.