St Peter Port to Dartmouth

Yet another one of those trips when the best time to leave to take advantage of the tides was not practical as we wanted to leave Guernsey in daylight - too many little pot markers around in the little Russel channel to risk it in the dark. We were planning an overnight passage on Monday / Tuesday, leaving before dusk on Monday but a bad night's sleep beforehand and general sloth changed that to an early Tuesday departure.

The 4am alarm noise was most unwelcome. Mind you, the still harbour as we departed at 4:30am was lovely, as was the sunrise over the water. No picture this time though. The sea state was gentle - some 1.5 metre waves just off Guernsey (right on the nose of course, as usual) spiced it up a little just as a BIG pod of dolphins came over to play. They didn't stay with us for long but this was the biggest pod we had seen so far on our travels.

Crossing the shipping lane area, we missed the "Anne charm" from our outbound trip. We had to divert for this guy:

Our route, for the "stalkers" using marinetraffic.com or similar looks strange. That is because we let the tide carry us west and clear of the traffic separation scheme, then as it turned, back eastwards:

On higher magnification you can also see the "kink" in the trail the ship above caused. For non boating folks, if you "fight" the tide that runs through the channel and across a straight line course to Dartmouth, you waste lots of time and fuel. As long as the set to the west during the trip is balanced by an equivalent set to the east after the tide turns, you just steer your planned course and let it all happen around you so to speak. We ended up being pushed about 8 nautical miles to the west by the tide initially but as you see from our track, it unwound pretty quickly. We were steering a constant course throughout. Well, by "we", we mean "the nice Simrad autopilot" who doesn't get tired, loose concentration or demand a loo break.

The weather was great and it was an easy crossing. Here are two ways of seeing the approach to Dartmouth. Firstly, by mark 1 eyeball:

At the same time, this is what the flybridge plotter shows you:

It doesn't show the real beauty of the place unfortunately.

The entrance castles and fortifications are always impressive:

We found a nice spot just below the higher ferry on an almost empty mid-river visitors pontoon. Of course, the captain just has to point the boat towards the pontoon and get it alongside whilst the crew has to lug about the big heavy fenders, attach the mooring lines etc. The captain even had time to take pictures of all this activity:

The view aft from our berth was pretty good too, Dartmouth is such a lovely place especially in the sun:

John and Kath, the owners of "Prime Time" whom we last met in Weymouth were opposite us in the Dart marina (another wildly expensive place!!) The RIB was launched and acted as a water-taxi. J and K joined us for a simple supper on board as they planned to depart the next morning for St Peter Port. Just a lot faster than we would make it of course.

Maintenance news:

Well, we have some this time. Not the big Lugger - that ran very happily. Not the wing engine although we gave it some exercise en route to keep it happy. Not the genset either as it wasn't needed. Instead, during a not particularly bumpy part of the 72 mile passage, we heard a thump from "down below" in the cabins. The crew found this:

"This" is the space where a piece of the forecabin headlining had fallen down. Most unexpected. Still, refitting it was a one minute job (almost all boat builders use velcro pads to hold the panels in place) and it did prove that Nordhavn fitted lots of nice insulation between the headlining and the fibreglass cabin roof.

New navigation PC - well, the irritating problem where it loses the access to the charts stored on the Furuno equipment keeps happening but that doesn't stop it from being useful in displaying an AIS picture etc. Paul the Maricom man suggested an upgrade to the software on the Furuno equipment but that wasn't going to be simple (owing to the age of the kit of course!) so we will not perform that ourselves yet just in case it trashes the previously very reliable Furuno system.

We will wait until we are closer to Paul in case it needs rescuing afterwards..... We hope that Furuno upgrades are more reliable than the Microsoft equivalents but don't want to risk it....