Ardfern to Carradale bay anchorage

It wasn't an early early start. Just earlier than we would have picked. Leaving around 7am meant having an alarm set just in case. Naturally, it was not needed. We had a nice quiet trip with a wild 2.6 knot wind to gentle ruffle the surface of the sea. Just not very much. A grey start developed nicely into a sunny day as as headed south, pushing the tide a bit so that we could take it with us down to the Mull of Kintyre from around Gigha, and then around and up the other side almost all the way to the planned anchorage in Carradale Bay.

Nearing the island of Gigha, we spotted another Nordhavn on the AIS, only a way bigger, newer and nicer one. Due North, normally resident in Craobh was anchored off the island and was pottering around the northern end of it:

We passed too far off to get you some pictures of the lovely Nordhavn 68 and the equally lovely owner Gordon but you can see her properly on this You tube link.  Well worth looking at.

As we headed down to the Mull of Kintyre itself, we picked up a nice fair tide as planned and a couple of larger craft joined in:

The blue triangles on our system denote craft with the "Class A" AIS system that broadcasts more information then the cheaper class B kit. The B guys get distinguished by a green triangle. Anything the system thinks we are coming into close contact with (we define close contact) go a nice shade of red. One of them was a rather lovely Dutch classic sailing ship heading for Dublin just very slowly.

Looking towards the land, not the Dutch sailing ship, you get to see:

the lighthouse complex kind of dwarfed and rendered insignificant by the landscape it is set into.

Despite the 2.3 knots wind speed there was a reasonable swell on the beam, coming from the west / south west so for once we needed to activate the stabilisers to keep the crew happy and the boat on the proverbial even keel. The wind picked up but not to any great extent  - the one yottie out there was still motoring to get the right timing for the tides. As we rounded the Mull, taking an inshore route as it was relatively calm even in the areas with big depth variations, we got up to 11.6 knots over the ground - the cameraman was too slow to record vmax though:

so you will have to be content with 11.4 in the picture. At times we were getting 6 knots of tidal help. Very nice indeed. Here is the route:

and you can see the loop around the Mull. The little island group to the south of the Mull is Sanda-  we showed you that it was up for sale recently but it seems that none of our readers have put in an offer yet. We really don't understand why, You get views like this:

and when you look across to the mainland:

OK, it might not be that sunny and calm every day but... The islands look a bit boring from the camera picture:

but way better in real life, on a warm sunny day. In mid-winter with a full gale blowing you might regret your purchase a little bit more.

As we turned north, the wind picked up on the nose and things felt more "normal". The captain spotted a strange shape off to the east and through the binoculars it revealed itself as a submarine on the surface. Way too far away for a proper picture but you get the general idea from this:

We checked the forecast to make sure that the planned anchorage was still going to be sheltered, plodded up to Carradale Bay and dropped anchor in about 10 metres of water (which would be around 8 metres at low tide) with only 4 other yachts around. Amazing, peak season, lovely day, lovely anchorage in a huge bay area, pretty view, Isle of Arran mountains astern and still only 5 boats overnighting. Here is the view towards the mainland:

We'd been here once before with the Toddlers on board when a swarm (wrong collective noun but it felt like a swarm) of jellyfish killed our generator as we were cooking dinner. Not good to disrupt Toddler feeding times or to sting the captain when he fished out from the cooling water filter some extruded jellyfish remains. This time, we were lucky although some huge ones did drift past.

The wind dropped nicely and what should and could have been a very quiet and relaxing night became a real PITA. We'd taken the mobile phone into the cabin as it can link to our Furuno navigation gear and relay an anchor alarm. Only it decided to keep telling us that we had lost a mobile phone signal and that it was switching to WiFi calling (the boat has a WiFi setup, using an external aerial and a SIM card that can get signals in areas where the phone fails). A half asleep captain killed the alerts. They happened again. So, he disabled repeat notifications. Only they kept coming. Then we killed all notifications from the phone app. That didn't stop the ***** noises either. Eventually we just stopped all alerts - not what we wanted but we also needed sleep. 

The morning dawned sunny and pretty calm again, unlike the captain and crew who were suffering from a very disturbed night. Luckily we were anchored well away from any other humanity so nobody witnessed that.

Maintenance News:

Nothing to report. We gave the wing engine a workout as we approached the anchorage and it also behaved well. All in all a run of just over 12 hours that was pretty calm and enjoyable. Surely this gentle weather cannot last?