Penarth to Falmouth

For once, the world of weather was kind. The forecasts said that there would be gentle easterly winds which are pretty good for the trip around Land's End. They also said that they would stay that way for several days - even better, letting the normal Sw'ly swell die down. Seeing a couple of days with near perfect forecasts we had to go for it and escape Penarth (before the next lockdown perhaps?) 

The timings for a trip worked out well too. It looked like locking out from the bay a couple of hours before high water and running a little harder than normal would allow us to take advantage of the tides and have quite a quick trip. So, we did just that. Leaving Penarth for the 8am barrage lock, we followed a local charter fishing boat called Anchorman. She is the tidiest charter boat ever and Dave the skipper is always cleaning, polishing and maintaining her.  He kindly took some pictures for us as we were waiting:

 

And then helped with our lines in the lock too. There are floating pontoons but they are so high that we cannot open our side door which makes stepping off tricky as it has to be done from the bathing platform which is well below the pontoon height.  Out to sea conditions were perfect. Very little wind, initially astern of us and wall to wall sun as well. Shame it was only about 10 centigrade outside or it would have been perfect for a flybridge trip. Instead we enjoyed the calm seas and sun from the pilothouse:

Pottering along the north Cornish coast, the winds died down even further:

True wind speed of 0.2 knots? Pretty calm. A little fair weather cloud built up before sunset and treated us to glorious skies:

Then we settled in for the night-time run down to and around Lands End. The captain enjoyed watching some dolphins performing on the FLIR image as darkness set in. The crew was on duty later on when we were called on the radio by Falmouth coastguard at 2.40 am. Most strange, only happened once before and that was when the rescue helicopter pilot who had landed his winchman on us a few hours before wanted to get some of the photos we took! The crew refuses to use the radio, claiming her VHF course was ages ago and she would not know the answers to any questions anyway so the captain had to rouse himself.  It turned out that they saw we were planning an inshore passage not via the traffic lanes but on the AIS system, we showed a length of 40 metres.

Er, what??? The captain checked the AIS and sure enough over the winter it had decided to stretch us from 15m x 5m to 40m x 6m. No idea why. Reading the Furuno AIS manual, it said that a password was needed to access that setup information which was only held by Furuno dealers. Great. Some 3am internet searching (yes, we still had a signal amazingly) found the key sequence needed and the boat was restored to her former size. The vessel type was confused as well, apparently we had turned into a fishing boat. With a grey hull and workboat looks we've often been likened to a military craft, never a fishing one though.  

We rounded Land's End in the calmest conditions ever then headed east as the sun rose.

Another great start to the day. It was so calm we cut inshore around the Lizard peninsular to shave a little distance off the trip. Normally we stay well off to avoid the overfalls and generally sloppy sea conditions there.

A little wide open throttle run towards the Falmouth harbour entrance and then into one of our happy places. The estuary is so so pretty and restful. We headed up to our favourite spot, a mid river pontoon just above the King Harry ferry and Smugglers cottage only to find it was already full - the first weekend that English boaters were allowed to stay on board after the Xmas Covid lockdown. That meant heading back to the mid-river pontoon just above the estuary itself.  We didn't feel cheated with views like these from our mooring:

After some recovery time, we took the RIB upriver to Trelissick and went for a walk around the woods. A couple of laid up ferries this time, showing the impact of Covid / Brexit on the truck and passenger ferry business. The European Seaway has an interesting history in service, worth a Google search (other search engines are, of course, available):

 Laying alongside her was the Pride of Burgundy:

an elderly tug and the strange orange and green thing in the foreground. It was good to have a walk after the trip. Amazingly we only took 26 hours from Cardiff to Falmouth harbour entrance, the tides and rpm planning (1650) worked well. 

Maintenance news:

Nothing to report apart from the strange AIS setup issue that we reported on earlier. The settings had been last changed in 2009 when we bought the boat and had worked perfectly until this trip. We had fired up the equipment during the lockdown from time to time as well. All most strange....