Bangor to Neyland (Milford Haven)

After nearly two weeks of blowy stuff, a little weather window was promised which would allow us to run down to South Wales without getting a battering from the waves. 33 hours or so underway in rough stuff is not tempting when you don't have to do it.

So, we duly returned the little Aygo to the harbour airport (OK, now it is the "George Best City airport" but who names an airport after an alcoholic?) wandered into the marina office to pay (ouch) and this time had a more normal Bangor customer service experience. In fact one of the team had even delivered a couple of little packages to the boat for us and posted them through the pilothouse ventilation window when we were not there.

The trip to Milford Haven is a tricky one to time. You need to take the tide with you around the Norn Iron coast to begin with and ideally don't want to be pushing it as you round St Davids head and into Milford Haven. We had considered going all the way to Cardiff but the tide timings just do not work for that trip at all - the constraint of arriving at Cardiff near high water is one too many.

A civilised 10am departure would allow an equally civilised arrival around 6pm the following day at Milford Haven and then we intended to anchor off  Dale, just inside the entrance. Here is the start of the trip according to Marinetraffic:

It was also the bumpiest bit as the strong northerly winds of the past few days had picked up some waves - nothing too serious though only up to a couple of metres. It did mean that our initial track to the Copeland islands threw up a little spray but once we turned to run with the wave pattern, the stabilisers kicked in and things were quite pleasant with some sun to enjoy:

Kylie and Patrick seemed happy with the view too.

During the afternoon, we had quite a gaggle of fishing boats around us:

but we managed to sneak through unscathed:

To be fair this picture was taken with the PC software set to display a large chunk of the Irish Sea  - it wasn't that close a call!

The moon put in an appearance:

as did a lovely sunset:

You can see how the sea was calming down nicely, amazingly the forecast was spot on for wind direction and strength this time. That gave us a very calm night time passage, seeing the liner Queen Mary heading north up to Stornoway:

a bit blurry thanks to just using the phone camera but you get the idea of how lit up she was. We dread to think how much fuel she burns just to power all those lights.

Our calm evening was rudely interrupted by an overtaking ship, The Scot Mariner. She was not going that fast and had been overhauling us from a slight angle astern for a while. She got closer and closer and when our AIS said the closest point of approach was going to be 100 metres, in 15 minutes, we kept a very close eye on them and finally called on the radio. The exchange went something like:

Rockland to SM - We see that your CPA is around 100m and wondered what your intentions are

SM reply - To avoid you

Rockland to SM - Well, as long as someone is awake on the bridge then we trust you will

Sarcastic watchman, who came far too close, only altering course at the last minute (he was the give way vessel, dangerous for us to alter course) and giving us about 150 metres clearance as he passed astern. If we had done that to them, or if our engine had failed or......  The offending ship:

at least he was awake and had his navigation lights and AIS on.

The rest of the trip was less eventful:

Nice and calm as we approached the Bishop rocks off St Davids head and a few dolphins to watch. They didn't come to play with us - most unusual in Welsh waters. Perhaps they were heading back up north....

Passing Skokholm island (a bird sanctuary) we thought that we should add this to our lighthouse picture bank:

Just as we were looking forward to turning into the Milford Haven entrance, a tanker thing decided to leave with a pilot boat and three tugs in attendance, rather blocking up the western entrance so we had a little loop around to use the eastern one:

Quite a big liquified gas ship. Our planned anchorage off Dale and a possible departure on Tuesday early morning to Cardiff was cancelled as the revised weather forecasts had force 7 in them, together with heavy rain. So we opted for Neyland instead where we could walk ashore and visit the Co-op for supplies. Nothing that grand in Dale....

The trip actually took around 32 hours. We ran a little harder than usual (1700 rpm, around 11.5  litres per hour with the stabilisers working) for much of it to help avoid pushing a strong tide as we approached South Wales. That worked well; we have been rounding Skokholm in the past only making a couple of knots headway. Nothing on the maintenance front to report - the main engine behaved perfectly, as did the wing which got a little run as we entered the harbour area. The prop on the wing is getting a bit fouled up though as when in "overdrive" mode (ie the coarser propeller pitch) the wing will not pull its full rpm now. One oddity - the Time Zero software on the PC decided to restart itself once. No idea why, no messages just a restart and then it worked perfectly again. Thank you Microsoft for developing such a stable environment to run software in.....