Campbeltown to Bangor (Northern Ireland)

You know hope the tides sometimes conspire to force early morning starts? Well, this was another one of them. 5:30am alarm so we could be off after waking up with some tea by 6am. A couple of yachts headed out with us, doing the same tidal thing so we were not alone. One benefit of the early start was seeing the sun breaking through the clouds as we headed out of Campbeltown Loch:

and making some impressive patterns:

The idea of this silly start time is to take the last of the tide south down the side of the Mull of Kintyre, then avoid the nasty current that runs around the Mull at the bottom before it builds up and to take the flood tide all the way down to Bangor in Northern Ireland. The length of the trip (47 nautical miles or so) just about lets us do that at our economical 1450rpm cruise speed. A real "three waypoint" trip as you can see:

There had been a consistent NW'ly wind for a while and that was continuing with force 5 gusts. That had dragged up a bit of a wave pattern reaching around 2m high or so in the roughest bits. As this was on the stern quarter, our stabilisers were busy and in turn the autopilot was busy keeping the boat heading in roughly the right direction, fighting the stabiliser effect. Nothing dramatic though, we still managed a nice calm trip.

Heading past Sanda Island (the little "dot" to the SE of the Mull of Kintyre on the route image above), we needed our one course alteration of the trip. A little fish farm support ship was determined to make life difficult. Each time we did the "clear course alteration" to give him sea room, starting around 3 miles off, he altered course towards us again. Not very seamanlike but the guy at the helm clearly did not care. He has a route set and would keep following it no matter if a little trawler yacht was nearby (not that we would push that point!).  It wasn't even a pretty thing to look at as it passed by half a mile distant.

This is how our plotter saw the ship:

and our little course alteration. 

We thought that things were not too bad out to sea, there was one "Pan Pan" radio call from a yacht who had lost steering and was determined to tell the coastguard all about what had happened rather than giving them his position straight away. We heard the patient but irritated coastguard finally get a position from the solo sailor and say that they had arranged a lifeboat launch. Later on we saw this post from the Redbay lifeboat:

Difficult conditions, rough sea, strong winds? We reckon they overstated that a bit as it was pretty calm by the time we got to the Northern Ireland coast

As for our trip, we just headed down to Bangor, called them on the radio and were given a nice hammerhead berth, This was good for the crew with a recovering back as the fenders on the port side were not needed. Well, I say good not excellent as she had already rigged two of them. Such is life.

Awaiting us on the pontoon were Ken and his daughter Annika so we had expert help securing our lines and even better, they delivered some pastries too. Welcome to Norn Iron indeed. 

The trip took around 7.5 hours overall at 1450 rpm, there was some sun (rare this year) but still no dolphins. 

Maintenance News:

The big Lugger ran quite happily as did the nav gear. We had gone wild and updated our electronic charts whilst in Campbeltown. However, only on the navigation PC and the "stand alone" laptop that we use sometimes for route planning. The update process on our Furuno black box is easy enough but if we did that we would have to update the little plotter on the flybridge at the same time. That involves taking the "navpod" it is fitted into apart to access the SD card slot in the back of the plotter. It seemed like too much "fun" just for the chart update so we are saving that until we are back in Penarth.

There is an operating system and software update also available for the Furuno gear and it makes sense to do the whole lot when the navpod is apart. We didn't want to tempt the gods of failed IT updates by doing this rather bigger change in Campbeltown when we want the kit to work for a few more trips in 2022!!