waiting for the weather
Well, we're STILL in Falmouth, not putting many miles under our belts so far!
It has proved to be quite sociable with friends living here, our sailmaker up the road, a visit from our neighbour at Turf and friends over from Ireland to buy a boat.
Falmouth is an enormous natural harbour, one of the largest in the world and there is a surprisingly deep water channel most of the way up - 40 to 50 feet, slightly different to the Exe! There are loads of boats - cruise liners, ships, tugs and pilot boats, sailing yachts, racing Falmouth work boats, tiny dinghies and rowing stiffs.
We've been for a sail in the lower part of the harbour and motored upriver as far as Malpas, a few miles short of Truro. The river is quite narrow and secluded once you get further up, so it was a surprise to turn a corner and find ourselves face to face with an enormous ship, luckily attached to mooring buoys!
We even saw dolphins in the harbour, jumping alongside 'Ros Ailither' as we motored back down to Falmouth town at the crack of dawn one morning. After consulting our dolphin book (thank you John!), we reckon they were bottlenose dolphins, but we could be wrong...
We have also been making progress in other ways. We've finished building our main deck hatch out of iroko, which has been a temporary bodged affair for the past three years. We've taken down the chimney to give us chart room in the wheelhouse despite the fact that summer has so far failed to materialize.
We've got ourselves a new (blue) topsail, but have yet to try it out properly. We went for a trial sail out to sea yesterday and were hammering along nicely at 6 or 7 knots under sails alone but it was too windy for the topsail (we tried...).
We've shopped our fill at Trago Mills and tried nearly every variety of pasty on offer (chicken tikka, mushroom stroganoff, peppered steak...) so reckon it's nearly time to make a move...
So we're sitting here with our friend Simon in his 21 foot clinker boat (which he's also hoping to sail back to Ireland) waiting for a good forecast. So far, every day seems to bring more gale warnings for the Lundy /Fastnet areas.
The plan was to go to a boat rally in Baltimore (Ireland) this weekend but if the bad weather persists we may even head back for the Brixham trawler race this weekend. After all, we're retired now so why rush?!
It has proved to be quite sociable with friends living here, our sailmaker up the road, a visit from our neighbour at Turf and friends over from Ireland to buy a boat.
Falmouth is an enormous natural harbour, one of the largest in the world and there is a surprisingly deep water channel most of the way up - 40 to 50 feet, slightly different to the Exe! There are loads of boats - cruise liners, ships, tugs and pilot boats, sailing yachts, racing Falmouth work boats, tiny dinghies and rowing stiffs.
We've been for a sail in the lower part of the harbour and motored upriver as far as Malpas, a few miles short of Truro. The river is quite narrow and secluded once you get further up, so it was a surprise to turn a corner and find ourselves face to face with an enormous ship, luckily attached to mooring buoys!
We even saw dolphins in the harbour, jumping alongside 'Ros Ailither' as we motored back down to Falmouth town at the crack of dawn one morning. After consulting our dolphin book (thank you John!), we reckon they were bottlenose dolphins, but we could be wrong...
We have also been making progress in other ways. We've finished building our main deck hatch out of iroko, which has been a temporary bodged affair for the past three years. We've taken down the chimney to give us chart room in the wheelhouse despite the fact that summer has so far failed to materialize.
We've got ourselves a new (blue) topsail, but have yet to try it out properly. We went for a trial sail out to sea yesterday and were hammering along nicely at 6 or 7 knots under sails alone but it was too windy for the topsail (we tried...).
We've shopped our fill at Trago Mills and tried nearly every variety of pasty on offer (chicken tikka, mushroom stroganoff, peppered steak...) so reckon it's nearly time to make a move...
So we're sitting here with our friend Simon in his 21 foot clinker boat (which he's also hoping to sail back to Ireland) waiting for a good forecast. So far, every day seems to bring more gale warnings for the Lundy /Fastnet areas.
The plan was to go to a boat rally in Baltimore (Ireland) this weekend but if the bad weather persists we may even head back for the Brixham trawler race this weekend. After all, we're retired now so why rush?!
posted by Katie at 10:14 AM
1 Comments:
Sounds great to me the - retiired bit - must be nice. Good luck to you both.
Post a Comment
<< Home