Chilling in Bangor

As we've said before, Bangor feels like a second home somehow. Even more so this year as we saw the boats belonging to folks we know arriving back into the marina. Here is Keith's yacht Scotia:

Keith and Ingrid seem very focussed on Bailey the dog who takes all the attention in a very relaxed way:

Ken wanted to turn his Hardy around on her berth but decided that he might as well go for a little run out to sea as well:

A good job that the sun was not out or the shine from the hull would have blinded the camera. One sparkly boat.

The crew got heavily into baking mode. Ginger loaf, then granary bread:

I have a feeling that if we stay here too long we will not be able to walk very far.

Sitting in the saloon, admiring the rain running down the windows, we spotted the local IRB bringing in a yacht and dropping her onto the berth astern of us:

Then we learned that the yacht is owned by the lifeboat coxswain. We do hope that it was a training exercise or he might never live down the humiliation. Perhaps there is something going on here as the following night, we witnessed the marina workboat towing another yacht to her berth from the harbour entrance:

Wonder if there is a "Bangor triangle" for boat engines around here. Or someone selling dodgy diesel? (Actually that happened in the marina a while ago but we will not spill any beans.....) 

We unknowingly took advantage of the government "eat out to help out" by having an outside coffee at Cafe Brazilia with George, another boat owner, which was most pleasant and ended up as quite a bargain too. Thank you Mr Sunak. Raiding Asda for some essentials was instructive and worrying. The "wear a mask in shops" rule had only recently been introduced in Northern Ireland and folks seemed to be struggling with it. Big time. The concept of covering the nose as well as the mouth seems too hard. For some folks even wearing a mask seemed too hard. No wonder the R rate here is heading north far too rapidly for comfort.

You haven't heard from our pesky crewmember Patrick the penguin recently. Well, this time he seems to have excelled himself. Colin the ex BA captain, ex Lighting fighter pilot, ex RN helicopter pilot and fellow Nordhavn owner sent us this:

Sure enough Partick looked very crestfallen when he was returned to the boat. Martin (another Nordhavn proper chap whom you have met via these ramblings before) commented on how lucky Patrick was, saying that if he had gone walkabout in the USA the cops would probably have shot him. Only the black bits mind you.

One thing that really impressed us about Bangor was the focus on hand sanitising. It even extended to the pontoon mounted taps:

Shame that the local townsfolk seem less aware of the risks.

Why did we stay chilling here? Well, this forecast wind strength had something to do with it:

You can figure out that red is not good. The wave heights looked equally unappealing:

Red means 6 metres plus by the way. Not tempting at all. For folks who like words not pictures:

So, we rigged extra fenders and mooring lines, raided the shop for food and hunkered down to ride out the storm. OK, it is officially a severe gale, we exaggerate a teeny bit by saying storm.

Whitehaven to Bangor

After being splashed again, we spent a happy few days afloat in Whitehaven, enjoying the sun, one huge thunderstorm (a hole was blown in the roof of a house a quarter of a mile away) and general sloth after a busy weekend:

As all good things muct come to an end and we were fed up cleaning huge piles of nasty black seagull poo off the boat each day, we decided to move on to Bangor in Northern Ireland. There was a persistent NE'ly wind that was pretty strong and so we opted to stay until most of it had blown through. The forecast for Thursday had lots of F6 in it and some chunky waves but for Friday it would slowly calm down, meaning a bumpy start to the trip with waves around 2 metres on the stern quarter which would then die down as we get closer to Ireland. Departure time was to be around high water which was, unfortunately, just before 7am. At least it was sunny as we headed out:

The strange and scruffy looking observation thing is closed - loooks like a part of the Whitehaven regeneration money that was well spent by the local council. The lock infrastructure was a way better investment and we sneaked through on free flow - only just,  as owing to the neap tides there was not much depth in the marina itself:

The route to Bangor is pretty simple until you get to the Copelands (the little islands off the coast) which we opted to head inside of rather than around, knowing that we should get there before the tide turned against us too much - it runs rather hard through there:

You can see that we get pretty close to the Mull of Galloway too, timing that to have a fair tide was important and we happily saw just over 9 knots across the ground (2.5 knots of help), We ran faster than normal (1650 rpm) to take best advantage of the tides which worked well.

Since we were close(ish) to the Mull, the obligatory lighthouse pic was taken:

There was no other traffic about, one Stena ferry in the distance and nothing else apart from one pot marker to make us divert until a yacht arived at the buoy to the north of Ballymacormick point at the same time as us. He was motorsailing and should have given way according to the rules but in the style of some irritating yotties, because he had a flappy thing up in the air he expected us to divert.

When you see this buoy you know that Bangor is pretty close and it is time to give the main engine a burn and think about fenders and lines:

When we radioed the marina we were delighted to be given a hammerhead berth. Even more delighted that it was one previously occupied by a Nordhavn 76 owned by a local guy (she was in our blog many years ago, we met in Craobh) so it had much better cleats than the normal ones and also a 32 amp power supply.  Happy days. Sitting on the flybridge enjoying the evening sun and view was a fitting end to the trip:

Maintenance news - not a lot - the wing engine stuffing box might need easing off a bit - it hasn't dripped as much as it should since the relaunch. The big Lugger just kept going. We had one tough job - in a particularly bumpy bit the double sided tape that holds the pelmet above one of the pilothouse window blinds decided to fall off. You will be relieved to know that this major structural item has been reattached now: