Whitehaven to Bangor

After being splashed again, we spent a happy few days afloat in Whitehaven, enjoying the sun, one huge thunderstorm (a hole was blown in the roof of a house a quarter of a mile away) and general sloth after a busy weekend:

As all good things muct come to an end and we were fed up cleaning huge piles of nasty black seagull poo off the boat each day, we decided to move on to Bangor in Northern Ireland. There was a persistent NE'ly wind that was pretty strong and so we opted to stay until most of it had blown through. The forecast for Thursday had lots of F6 in it and some chunky waves but for Friday it would slowly calm down, meaning a bumpy start to the trip with waves around 2 metres on the stern quarter which would then die down as we get closer to Ireland. Departure time was to be around high water which was, unfortunately, just before 7am. At least it was sunny as we headed out:

The strange and scruffy looking observation thing is closed - loooks like a part of the Whitehaven regeneration money that was well spent by the local council. The lock infrastructure was a way better investment and we sneaked through on free flow - only just,  as owing to the neap tides there was not much depth in the marina itself:

The route to Bangor is pretty simple until you get to the Copelands (the little islands off the coast) which we opted to head inside of rather than around, knowing that we should get there before the tide turned against us too much - it runs rather hard through there:

You can see that we get pretty close to the Mull of Galloway too, timing that to have a fair tide was important and we happily saw just over 9 knots across the ground (2.5 knots of help), We ran faster than normal (1650 rpm) to take best advantage of the tides which worked well.

Since we were close(ish) to the Mull, the obligatory lighthouse pic was taken:

There was no other traffic about, one Stena ferry in the distance and nothing else apart from one pot marker to make us divert until a yacht arived at the buoy to the north of Ballymacormick point at the same time as us. He was motorsailing and should have given way according to the rules but in the style of some irritating yotties, because he had a flappy thing up in the air he expected us to divert.

When you see this buoy you know that Bangor is pretty close and it is time to give the main engine a burn and think about fenders and lines:

When we radioed the marina we were delighted to be given a hammerhead berth. Even more delighted that it was one previously occupied by a Nordhavn 76 owned by a local guy (she was in our blog many years ago, we met in Craobh) so it had much better cleats than the normal ones and also a 32 amp power supply.  Happy days. Sitting on the flybridge enjoying the evening sun and view was a fitting end to the trip:

Maintenance news - not a lot - the wing engine stuffing box might need easing off a bit - it hasn't dripped as much as it should since the relaunch. The big Lugger just kept going. We had one tough job - in a particularly bumpy bit the double sided tape that holds the pelmet above one of the pilothouse window blinds decided to fall off. You will be relieved to know that this major structural item has been reattached now: