Dale (Milford Haven) to Whitehaven

The tides do like to play havoc with our sleep patterns. Having been up at 3:15am to head to Dale from Cardiff and then being glued to the radar for much of the trip, we really would have liked a nice long sleep. However, the weather was very favourable for us to press on the next day up to Whitehaven. Only the tides and the need to arrive in Whitehaven around high water (they have a lock which is not accessible at all states of the tide as the approach dries) dictated a 5am departure. Yuk.

A slightly disturbed and all too brief night at anchor was ended by a 4:30 alarm clock. We somehow roused ourselves, fired up the donkey, recovered the trusty Rocna anchor and headed off. This time, the weather forecast was wrong. They said that Dale would still be blanketed in fog but it had cleared. Wow. 

The view across to the delightful refineries in Milford Haven from our anchorage, just to prove the fog had finally shifted:

 

The start of the trip involved heavy FLIR use to avoid the expected pot markers, only there were none. It was also pretty calm once round St David's head and pointing north. The fates had conspired to help us it seemed. There was no firing activity in the range in Cardigan Bay, no ships to avoid, no fishing boats zig-zagging in front of us. Almost boring really until one of the two instances of the Furuno Time Zero Touch 2 black box decided to reboot itself. No idea why, it had done this once before, again for no obvious reason. However, it all came back happily so we will just see if there is a software update to apply (which would probably introduce lots of other errors anyway). The last time we checked (early April) everything was up to date.

More positively, the elderly laptop that came from the toddlers with an old version of Windows on it was quite happy running the PC version of the Time Zero software and behaved very well indeed:

Just for interest, this is how the radar saw that spot:

Our timing plan worked very well, we rounded the headland at St Davids in South Wales with the tide, then did the same off Anglesey as per the images above. Getting favourable tides in the areas were they run strongly makes a big difference to the overall passage time for us. We kept our 1550 rpm or thereabouts cruise speed going: 

only this time you can see that the engine was running around 5 degrees cooler than on the last run from Cardiff. That is pretty normal, as the salt water and movement through the water slowly removes the slime and "stuff" that has grown on the hull and keel cooler during the winter time, when we sit in mainly fresh water. Now our cooler will begin to foul up with salt water nasty things that depost calcium layers and so our cruise temperature will up a little bit again. That is until the next lift out when the crew has the fun of scraping it all off once more. Tedious game.

Passing the Isle of Man, there is one huge wind farm that sits between it and the English coast. You can see the massed ranks of the turbines on this radar picture:

Somehow they look quite threatening at night on the radar. By the time we got closer it was just about daylight and they looked a whole lot nicer. Not friendly, but nicer.

Keeping our lighthouse theme going, here is St Bees, just south of Whitehaven:

Having managed to travel all the way from Dale with no need to alter our planned course for anything at all, one little fishing boat around 5 miles from our destination decided to turn onto a collision course so we had to "swerve" (well, as much as you can swerve at 6.4 knots) around him. Although this plotter picture looks close, we were a good half mile ahead of him. Our one collision avoidance action of the entire trip, amazing really:

Appraoching Whitehaven, more or less at high water, we were happy to see the harbour entrance:

and we were called through the sea lock on free flow:

and then onto a nice hammerhead berth that was pre-arranged. 

The trip is around 195 nautical miles (or 224 land miles) and it took us about 29 hours. If your maths works like ours, then you can see that our average speed over the trip of 6.7 knots is above our speed over the ground of 6.4. For once, thanks tides. One of the calmest runs that you would ever wish for in the Irish sea.

Maintenance news:

To add to the fuel expense of the trip, we noticed as day was breaking that the steaming light (the white one that shines forward) had failed. Annoyingly, it is the one that is not simple to replace underway. The port and starboard ones and the stern light can all be reached and the bulb swapped but this one is high up on a radar support and you have to unzip the back of the bimini cover to get to it. So, it had to wait. We then had the fun of taking out this little incandescent bulb:

and replaced it with an encapsulated LED thing that we bought in Northern Ireland some time ago. It will be interesting to see how well it lasts in comparison to the older technology it has replaced. It needs to last about 3 times as long for the economics to work out.