Neyland to Whitehaven

We sneaked off from Neyland and the very friendly staff there about an hour and a half before low water. There was not much to spare underneath our keel, any later would have been amusing in the extreme.

On the way out of Milford Haven, the crew of Allegro (see the last post) took some rare images of us underway that we need to share:

OK, you might not have needed them but it is our blog so we get to choose what is in here.

As usual, the sea state off Milford and passing the bird sanctuary islands of Skokholm and Skomer was pretty confused. As we cleared them and passed St Brides bay on the way to St David's head where we could turn to head "up north" it calmed a lot and there was a more regular wave pattern making the ride nicer and the stabilisers job easier too. The first part of the route looks like:

and it was pretty quiet. Little commercial traffic, no firing in the huge range area controlled by Aberporth, only a couple of fishing boats and no other pleasure craft out at all. We started to wonder if we had read the wrong weather forecasts!

Passing the South Bishop lighthouse heading north, it has become a tradition to take a picture. This time we were further off than before to clear the overfalls that the tide and wind were creating closer to the rocks:

As is often the way, we were treated to a superb sunset over Ireland:

and the night-time run up towards Anglesey was uneventful. It was nice and light for us passing the Skerries rocks and a chance for yet another lighthouse picture:

As we approached the SE corner of the traffic separation zone just north of there, a commercial guy was heading towards Liverpool. We were not going to be able to pass ahead of him as he came out of the TSS and if we had run to the east, he would have just followed us and delayed our trip north even more, so we opted for a confusing little circle outside the TSS to wait for him to get by:

then we resumed the run up passing the Isle of Man and the many windfarms and their support craft. Visiting the island is not possible anyway as they are stopping pleasure craft from berthing unless in need of refuge. We could not claim that really as it was a sunny day, pretty calm and all was going well. Both the high speed and convential ferries from England across to the island were out and about but no course alteration was needed for once - here is one crossing our bows at a nice 0.8 mile distance:

and here is the rest of the route for folks who need some form of spatial orientation to feel comfortable:

As dusk arrived we were off St Bees head, just south of Whitehaven. This is what it looked like from the pilothouse:

and how "warm" the FLIR thinks the cliffs are:

For info, the other "warm" lump in the sea is a bird, not a pot marker this time. In fact the approach to Whitehaven was remarkably marker free. Still very impressed with the FLIR and how it lets us spot markers, birds, dolphins etc at night, great piece of kit.

We locked in at Whitehaven (again no pictures as getting the boat into the lock and tied up with the swell following us in kept the captain fully occupied). Then a squeeze around the long visitor pontoon (not very deep between it and the lime tongue pier) and finally reversing onto our slot at the inside of it - all nicely pre-arranged by Simone the manager there:

Proper VIP treatment: if only we were VIPs.

The trip took just under 36 hours berth to berth, arriving about 10:30pm. Nothing too dramatic to report, a gentle 1500 rpm cruise most of the way, then a little 1800 rpm run towards Whitehaven and a final wide open throttle burn to give the engine and exhaust their usual clean out. The ARPA function on the Furuno radars is still struggling to acquire targets when the stabilisers are working hard and our heading is changing quickly. (For non boating folks, don't worry about it. Learning about what ARPA is will not enhance your life much.) We made some adjustments suggested by the Furuno UK guys to the inputs but it needs more tinkering.

As the weather for our first couple of days here is forecast to be somewhere between horrid and grim, there will be an opportunity to do that tinkering. So glad we got berthed well before this lot kicked off: