Falmouth to Skomer

Somehow it felt like a good time to leave Falmouth. The wind was gentle(ish), the forecast was OK and the sea state around Land's End was going to be fine too. We looked at the tide times and they worked well for a morning departure and following morning arrival at Skomer. Even better, the wind was turning northerly so although we would have it and the waves "on the nose" for the last bit of our trip, it was ideal for anchoring in Skomer's south haven.

With all those portents in place, we had to go. Did it pan out exactly as planned? Well, not quite but you will have to read on through lots of unexciting drivel first to find out why.

Leaving the Falmouth Haven marina was easy. Not because we wanted to escape the place, but because the wind was just blowing us off the pontoon in a gentle sideways glide. It looked like a very impressive manoeuvre with no thruster use but was entirely out of our hands.

Around the harbour entrance we ran into the typical Falmouth pot markers again:

The black flag on this one was a little larger than most (yes!) but made from the normal bin liner material. The worst one that we spotted was this little winner:

Yes, two old plastic cans lashed together. You wonder why no-one does anythng about this, most harbour authorites say that they do not have the powers  (or desire) to do so and out to sea in our territorial waters no-one is interested at all. Little point in another rant then! Or perhaps we could get the EU to pass some laws about pot marking to go with banana shapes? (OK, not a good time to mention the EU in this country....)

As we headed out past the fortifications guarding the harbour entrance, we spotted the first of the ships " awaiting orders":

This guy had clearly got his "orders" as a pilot was being landed on board:

He isn't going to win any beauty contests we fear, although the hull was quite a nice shade of maroon in the sunlight (trying to be kind).

The trip down towards the Lizard was uneventful (sorry). Normally rounding the Lizard means heading well offshore to avoid the overfalls and confused seas caused by the strong tides and often strong winds around the headland where there is a very uneven depth too. This time, it was pretty calm so we were able to cut inshore and get a picture of the totally uninspiring Lizard lighthouse to add to our strange collection. See what we mean:

Functional is perhaps the word. Still, we pottered along the south coast heading for Land's End and our ritual cream tea. Only this time, tradition was ignored (shock, horror). Why? Well, as soon as we got to the Runnel stone (have a look at the link, it will show you the nice cardinal marker which is the last thing we saw for ages) it got foggy. Very foggy. The forecast patches had all blended together into one big one off Land's End. So, radar on and no more pictures of the most westerly part of England for you to enjoy. Sorry again. The crew snoozed and the captain focussed on the radar so no big desire for a cream tea this time.

Oh, forgot to mention that then some hefty rain showers popped up too. To give you an idea of what they look like in the fog:

The returns (blobs to most of us) on the right hand side of the screen are Land's End. The speckly messy stuff towards the bottom is one of the big showers, before the radar was tuned to remove it. For those not familiar with radar, here is a later radar picture overlaid on the chart image:

You can easily see the deeper orange radar returns along the coastline and more speckly messy stuff ahead of us - big shower number 2 coming. Again, time to tune the radar to remove it. If you've never played with a marine radar then they tend to have two controls for removing "clutter" like this from the picture. One is specifically for rain so you just wind it up a bit to kill the mess shown above but must remember to turn it off again once the shower is out of the way.

So, you now can see what we saw for the run around Land's End and pretty much all the way up to South Wales too. No chance to spot any of the friendly Welsh Dolphins either. The overnight haul up to Skomer was into the wind but only around 1m waves so pretty insignificant for 40 plus tons of Nordhavn. When we arrived in the south anchorage off Skomer, it was totally empty. Bliss. It took 3 attempts for our normally trusty huge Delta anchor to hold though. Bad luck, tiredness?? Not sure. Anyway we finally killed the engine and instead of peace had bird calls to listen to. A favourite and truly wonderful spot:

Statistics for those so inclined, "the end" for everyone else:

We did the trip at around 1500rpm. Not our most economical cruise speed (that is 1450, less than that and you are not loading the engine enough to keep it moderately happy) but calculated so we could take advantage of fair tides in the critical areas of the Lizard and Land's End. With our heavy fuel load (and lots of water as the crew is always a little paranoid about running out despite the vast quantities that we can carry) 1500rpm equalled around 6 knots out to sea with stabilisers working and some speed loss due to the waves. That means about 1.6 litres of fuel per nautical mile. With a lighter (say half) fuel load that would be around 6.3 knots to give you a comparison.

The trip took about 23.5 hours (a record for us) to do around 153 nautical miles. The log showed 131 Nm through the water giving you an idea of the tidal help we had (ie about 22 free miles!) As a percentage of our trip, you can see that it is quite significant both in fuel burn and time taken. Hence we plan to work with the tides as far as possible!

Maintenance: 

Well, nothing to report, sorry. Actually that is not totally true. the highly irritating noise from the shaft brush that we had whined about before was not there. Clamping a lump of metal to the springy arm thing that holds the brush onto the shaft had altered its harmonics enough to shut it up. Wonderful, shame it could not be applied to some noisy people you meet in lovely quiet spots too.