Falmouth to Penarth - winter must be coming

Falmouth proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. A lovely walk around the headland to Gyllyngvase beach for coffee and a rather good carrot cake was a high point. Ditto an excellent lunch in a foody pub in Truro (the Rising Sun) with wonderfully friendly staff. However, a walk along the river to Penryn planning to visit our favourite Muddy Beach café was a dismal and annoying failure. When folks close for a week why can't they update their web and Facebook pages?  The little notice on the door was not what we wanted to see after a warm walk there which was followed by what seemed like a longer warmer walk back.

Knowing that the weather was going to break and that the usual series of Atlantic lows would be coming in, we spotted one nice weather window for the trip to our winter berth in Penarth. One calm(ish) day that would let things around Land's End settle down then another with slowly increasing SE - S winds which would mean plenty of shelter as we headed alongside the northern coast of Cornwall. 

We needed just over a day for the trip (180 nautical miles or so) and the forecasts for the following days were not nice. This is from Windy, showing 6 metre waves for a fair bit of our route a day later on:

The only drawback was that we were going to have fog but the radar is pretty good at seeing through that although it messes up the FLIR images.

We headed off around 8am with patchy fog. Leaving the berth you could see for about 20 metres, then as we passed the commercial port area it cleared so we could see some of the ugly stuff parked there:

Not the greatest of farewell views but all we got as the visibility closed in again. Here is the first part of the route:

Anchored off the Manacles (the "sticky out bit" just south of Falmouth) were a couple of tankers, as usual. One had been there for well over 3 weeks. It just feels so inefficient and such a bad use of huge capital expenditure seeing so much shipping laying around for so long in these "global recovery" times. Naturally we make an exception for Cruise liners who would act as little floating Covid factories, they can lay to anchor for many more months.

As it was calm, we cut inshore and fairly close to the Lizard, an area that can get bumpy with overfalls in strong winds and tides. We got to see the lighthouse and outbuildings through a gap in the fog banks but as they were just grey and shrouded in mist, no pictures for you this time. We did enjoy the company of plenty of dolphins though, with the crew standing outside and giving them plenty of encouragement for all of their tricks, jumps etc:

Things were pretty quiet passing Penzance and heading towards Land's End until this little fishing boat decided to change course (they were not fishing) and come across our bows. In theory he had to give way. Don't you love theory and fishermen:

The fog cleared from the surface of the sea by the time we reached Longships light house, so much so that we could also see Wolf Rock at the same time. However the land itself still had a little white / grey blanket over it:

It was pretty calm really, a little swell left and some small waves on top of it making the sea a bit confused but our timing was spot on. We took the tide with us along the south coast, caught a back eddy heading up to Longships and then the tide turned to help carry us around Land's End and up the first part of the north Cornish coast. Even the weather played ball as the wind did just as forecast:

True Wind Speed = 1.5 knots. Wow. 7.6 knots speed over the ground and about 6.4 speed through the water @1640 rpm. Yes, all was going well. There was no traffic about until we encountered this ugly thing which was surveying and also trying to avoid the pot markers left by the Padstow fishing boats. He called one up on the radio to check that they were just pots and not nets and got a real sloping shoulders reply of "I think so". Since the fishing boat had been chucking them over the side you would have hoped that he knew what he was throwing over. 

The ugly orange thing then decided to head in our direction and annoyingly he was showing that he wanted at least half a nautical mile clearance:

So, we had a small diversion from our course - this is how the camera saw 0.7 miles:

As night came in the tide started to turn against us but after nearly 12 hours of favourable streams, we could not complain. Timing for this trip always means that you have a slow time passing Hartland Point headland. Overnight we had a few fishing boats to keep us company, you can see a couple that the ARPA function on the radar had picked up and was tracking:

You also can see how the FLIR picks up the wave patterns. Sorry, but again we failed to get a picture of the dolphins on the FLIR - they are quite impressive at night too. 

As it started to get light so we were steaming along thanks to the next tide change towards Cardiff. A few ships were anchored mid-channel waiting for the high tide to go into Barry / Newport:

and we enjoyed a nice red sunrise and calm sea conditions:

The old saying of "Red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at morning, sailors warning" was most accurate as some nasty stuff was forecast for that evening. If you want to be a geek and understand why a red sky in the morning is a warning, look at Wikipedia link.

The barrage locks into Cardiff bay run inbound at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour. We arrived just outside the entrance channel at about 17 minutes past so we had a little bit of going in circles, some wing engine exercise, a wide open throttle burn to help the engine / exhaust and then headed in. As it was a pretty calm Sunday morning, all three locks had been used for the outbound 9am traffic. A small flotilla of fishing boats and yachts headed out and we then headed into the barrage area all alone. That was rather good:

A warm welcome from the duty dockmaster at Penarth followed - he said that he had been stalking us on AIS all the way from the Lizard peninsular. You are never alone with AIS it seems. All in all a great trip, the fastest time ever for that run thanks to the tides (25 hours) to do just about 190 nautical miles with diversions / getting out of Falmouth Harbour. For continental readers that is around 352 Km. Once more happy to see our favourite "home town" of Penarth, sad that the boating season is effectively over.

Maintenance News:

Nothing at all, pretty boring really. As the big Lugger was nice and warm, we treated it to an oil change shortly after arriving so it has nice fresh stuff in it for the quieter period ahead. Also as a thank you for looking after us this season.