Fowey to Falmouth

It rained. That added to the gloomy mood on board. After we'd looked at the weather forecast and tides for a trip back to Penarth, we decided that the best option was to head to either Falmouth or the Helford river anchorage, then leave the following morning to head around to Cardiff bay.  The forecast was far from ideal for the longer trip but it had to be done. The lovely old saying "the most dangerous thing on a boat is a calendar" is so true, time pressure can cause some silly and potentially dangerous go/no-go decisions. This one was not at that level, it was just going to be a bit livelier than we would wish for.

We backed off the nice mid-river pontoon in Fowey as the rain really picked up. By the time we were out of the harbour and we were back inside the pilothouse, it had stopped. Yup, perfect start. A simple trip with a bit of tidal help followed, just plenty of pot markers to dodge on the way - the last few settled days seem to have tempted all the inshore fishing boats out to throw every single pot they have into the sea.

The trip looks like this:

if you are the kind of person who studies charts or maps a lot. It looked like fairly calm sea (wind was coming off the land), some grey clouds and a couple of dolphins if you were observing from our pilothouse. Where to overnight? Well, the quickest start to our return "home" run would be from the Helford river. However, the lure of a proper shop in Falmouth to get some food was strong - Fowey mini-market really isn't too tempting and we were running out of things that looked healthy. Hence we went wild, spent a small fortune and had a night in Port Pendennis marina. The view of the RFA ships was pretty normal:

but we didn't realise just how dilapidated some of that fleet has become - one being detained in port as being deemed unsafe to go to sea by the authorities. Read this  Newspaper article to get a feel for how the navy auxiliary ships are in trouble. Sad state of affairs, maybe some of the much talked about but not visible increase in defence spending will go to them.

We raided Tesco, treated ourselves to a coffee and cake out then returned to prepare for what was going to be a bit of a delivery trip tomorrow. We'd had better days.