St Helier to St Peter Port

Our last few days in Jersey were spent catching up on some polishing (superstructure, there is a lot of it...), walking and testing out the local coffee shop. All stressful stuff.

The drying moorings in the harbour for local boats looked very cosy indeed. How on earth do you wriggle your way out of the far corner of the last row when the tide comes in and they are all afloat? Maybe up the ramp and onto a road trailer?

One place that we didn't visit was the rather grand Royal yacht hotel:

Think a stay there would have made our diesel bill look comparatively small.

We decided to stay in St Helier for longer than planned simply because the weather here was WAY better than back in the UK. Way better. Then we saw the UK forecast and weather warnings for Saturday saying heavy thunderstorms and flash flooding. So tempting.

As Wednesday was pretty blowy (and probably Saturday will be too) we decided to can the trip back to the UK and instead head for Guernsey on Thursday. Leaving just as the cill into the marina opened around 9am meant a civilised departure time and the chance to arrive at Guernsey early afternoon too. Guernsey is of course a closer jumping off point for any channel crossing too.

There was a good old swell / slop left from the strong winds on Wednesday evening. A smaller yacht that left with us had a pretty tough time heading west (ie into the waves) and turned back. Here is Elizabeth castle, on the way out of the harbour area:

This time we followed the inside passage of course, nodding gently into the waves. You really notice how much difference the full fuel (and water today - the crew has a phobia about running out of water) tanks make to the handling, roll frequency, pitching motion etc in bumpy stuff. When empty, you just use the stabilisers a bit more!  Passing Noirmont, you get a good view of the World War II defences like this rangefinding tower:

This time, we could get a picture of Corbiere lighthouse in the sun though - much nicer even if the sea was a bit bumpier:

Rounding Corbiere, the wave height increased as the swell reached the shallower areas and hit the tide that was running quite hard around the island. As we turned towards Guernsey we had 2 metre waves on the port bow with the odd 3 metre friend. The boat was very happy, and some new autopilot settings that the captain had tinkered with whilst in Jersey seemed to be working well (for the interested, a little more counter rudder and a slightly faster response to help when the autopilot is squabbling with the stabilisers for directional control). There is always something to optimise / tinker with if you care to do so - boys and their toys stuff...

As we passed Corbiere, the local Lifeboat which had been out on a "shout" earlier passed us returning to the harbour:

As you can see, with the benefit of excellent local knowledge and lots of horsepower, he was running through some narrow passages between the rocky outcrops in a way that we would not!

As we approached Guernsey, so it got a bit busy. The Ruby Princess passenger liner was anchored off, the Condor Express fast cat ferry was heading out of the harbour for Jersey and the French cat ferry Marin Marie from Granville was holding off the harbour, waiting to enter. The Condor ferry and the liner were a little further apart than this picture suggests of course:

The observant might notice a little Aquastar motorboat plugging along just ahead of the Condor Ferry. It looked like a strange animal was closing in on its lunch. There was a lovely VHF radio conversation when the St Peter Port traffic control man asked the French ferry if their AIS was switched on. (AIS for the non boaters is the neat device that tells other boats equipped with suitable stuff where he is, where he is going, how fast etc etc. It is compulsory for commercial craft like the ferry). The reply was "we know it is broken and it is being swapped next week". Funny, we knew it was broken well over a week ago when we saw them out to sea and commented on the lack of AIS. Rather lax approach for a passenger ferry operator??

The Condor decided not to eat the little motorboat but changed course to come close to us instead. You might recall this "pretty" thing entering Weymouth from our earlier post when we spent time there. Here she is doing 30 knots (and lord knows how many litres per hour of fuel!):

There was plenty of space on the harbour pontoons and (shock horror) since we were here 8 days ago, they have linked 2 of them to the shore with a long walkway! It becomes more marina like and less harbour like here. Luckily we were on a "remote" pontoon and so needed to get the dinghy out so we could raid Waitrose. Back enjoying the standard view of Castle Cornet:

The trip is only about 30 miles so not too taxing. No maintenance news (actually that is wrong - the coolant level in the genset expansion bottle got topped up. It had a coolant change a month or so ago and after a few hours running, the bubbles have worked their way out of the system). No other fun technical news so sorry all you tekkies out there. We could have a discussion about autopilot settings but we fear that only a small and very sad subset of the tekkies would be interested. You know who you are......