Milford Haven to Penarth - last proper trip of the year perhaps?

After our trip down from Troon, we had an excellent night's sleep and then a day at anchor too. There was no real need to rush back to Penarth and as the day had a strongish easterly wind forecast that would make it a bit of a bumpy trip, we opted for the extra day at anchor. It was a good call, a nice relaxing time, some admin and generally relaxing. The following day we were going to be treated to very gentle winds that would mainly be astern of us so why not make things easier. 

Arranging to work with the evil Bristol Channel tides kind of forced us to an early departure. One of those alarm clock setting things. So, we were up and ready to retrieve the anchor around 5:20 am. It was a bit foggy and the gas terminal looked a bit fuzzy thanks to the fog and a shaky hand holding the mobile phone for a quick picture:

As some light filtered through, you could more or less see the fog / mist and not too far ahead either:

The FLIR doesn't work as well in rain / fog and so when we departed in the dark, we were busy carefully inspecting the FLIR screen to see if any pot markers were around, much harder to spot them than usual. The main engine alternator was very busy replenishing the overnight use of the domestic batteries and the forward battery bank that had to run the anchor windlass and help drag up the nice Rocna anchor and a fair bit of Milford Haven mud too:

154 amps at 24 volts is quite a lot of power! The alternator was getting a good workout, luckily in a nice cool engine room to help keep the thing at a sensible temperature.

The trip up the channel was pretty uneventful really. Amazingly calm, a bit misty and almost no other traffic. Two fair sized pods of dolphins though, one of which just carried on swimming past us but the second came and spent a long time playing in our bow wave. No matter how many times you see them performing in the bow wave, it is always magical.  We also saw plenty of gannets which was encouraging after all the worries about bird flu wiping out the population.

As we approached Cardiff, we were getting nice rocket assistance from the incoming tide and hit 10.7 knots at times. We only managed to get a picture doing a more pedestrian 10.1 though:

Note the wind speed of just over 4 knots - lovely for motorboating. The prediction was for 3.1 knots of tide helping us:

and that was about right and happily enjoyed. We had left Milford a bit earlier than planned and thanks to a lovely smooth trip (no speed loss pushing through the waves or from the stabilisers working hard to keep us level) it went quicker than normal, just over 12 hours from Milford entrance to the Cardiff barrage lock:

It sounds a bit sad to be happy that what might well be the last sea trip of the year went quickly, but quite honestly this felt more like a delivery run than a summer cruising trip. The Bristol channel is not the loveliest area, visibility was not great, the water turns more brown and muddy the further east you get and we'd kind of accepted that "this was it"  for 2024. Yes, this was it:

The big move towards the south when we left Milford was to avoid a shallow area but also to get far enough south before the firing range to the east of Milford was active. They want boats to stay 5 miles south of the land.

As we entered the barrage lock at Cardiff Bay, we did a very neat job of coming alongside the floating pontoon and the crew secured the centre line nicely, then a stern one. Out of the barrage control office appeared Phil - he used to be a dockmaster in Penarth marina so we knew hm and started to chat. At the same time Steve and Rhiannon arrived on the bridge across the lock and started waving. Quite a welcome back. The crew then threw a bow line onto a cleat on the floating pontoon and somehow managed to get a turn around one of the end of the cleat. No idea how but it involved climbing onto the pontoon to free it off, watched by everybody of course. The throw was a one in a million thing that you could never repeat - or want to.

We called Penarth on the radio to gain entry and were warmly welcomed back., Yes, back in our second home. Despite the best efforts of plenty of weed in the marina we spun the boat around and berthed in our usual spot, with a nice view astern again of our sister boat, Malaspina which now has new owners:

It felt good to be back. 

Maintenance news:

Nothing really, We didn't even blow a navigation light bulb. However, one of the new LED downlighters that we fitted  into the headlining of our cabin, had failed. Way more expensive than a navigation bulb but hopefully a warranty job as it was purchased in the spring. An email to the supplier is needed.