7th September – departing Howth; Dublin Bay – Milford Haven – Falmouth

Leaving the Republic of Ireland in a blaze of glory.

After some R&R at Howth, we got ready for Rick and Lucy flying in from Dartmouth at about 0015 Monday morning.  Immediately after a safety briefing we slipped lines and sailed out on the tide at about 0230.  The winds were hardly in our favour, mostly southerly, so we made big tacks (Milford Haven and across again) hoping to be clear of Lands End early Tuesday as the High comes in bringing westerly, light breezes.  The plan was to be in Dartmouth on Tuesday night.

One of the dolphins guiding us through the vortex.

That wasn’t to be!  Late the following night – we found that our progress had seemed promising but the triangle of tidal streams SW of Pembroke made a vortex which defied anyone making progress into a southerly wind.  In the dead of night, surrounded by dolphins, we came close to Lundy Island then made a deep westerly tack and 16 hours later we saw … Lundy Island again.  The wind was rising to F7-8 and we decided to drop the Yankee and soon afterwards in a steady blast of severe gale (F9) the staysail blew out with the top panels shredded.  So down that came and up went the dayglow orange storm jib and we headed north for six hours to Milford Haven to rest until the wind passed by. 

The dolphins rode with us most of the way, jumping up occasionally to look in and see we were all ok.  I took some video clips of them and when I played them back you can quite clearly hear them chattering to each other … and to us.  look at the right hand side of this page, under Flickr and click on the third picture – the blue one of a dolphin – it is a fifteen second film clip.  Enjoy it!

I don’t have any pictures of Milford Haven - I remember soft grey welsh rain and the pub was very dark until a seventh person found their way into the bar and the landlord decided she could turn the lights on.  That was kind of tough, because I was playing darts with Geoff and had just thrown three darts into the corner of the room … “it’s over there, looksee” … and now Geoff was having his turn with a spotlight revealing exactly where the dartboard was (plus lots of darts sticking around the place).  But the beer was good, it was reasonably dry and we got refreshed for the next day.

A dolphin family outing, gently by the boat.

I proposed leaving Milford Haven at 0700 Wednesday.  The only way we could break out of the vortex with the southerly wind was to leave much earlier than seemed necessary, stem the tide to start with and make every bit of speed we could to exit the triangle of tidal, no-go vortex by over-reaching its influence and picking up the North Cornwall Westerly stream to take us round Lands End.  We flew the light air Genoa and made very good progress. And we met more dolphins, including a new wee baby dolphin in a family outing!  They would hear us and come charging from a distance to come and play in the boat’s wave system, taking free rides in the bow wave.

Wednesday night saw us nearing Lands End quite swiftly, passing the large restricted area of the new experimental Wave Hub which is some fifteen miles off the north Cornwall coast.  This will provide a large “three pin plug socket” for wave powered electricity generating devices to make power for the national grid and prove their suitability for wider deployment around the world.

I finished my watch at 0330 and when I came back on at 0730 I saw that we were punching our way into a strong Easterly wind and seeming to make very little progress.  The Lizard was still very much in view behind us and we could see Falmouth Eastward in the distance.  By mid morning a Gale warning came into force and the engine stopped with a choked fuel filter – I presume that the tossing around of the last few days in the Celtic Sea had raised two years worth of sludge from the bottom of the tanks, from when Bold Explorer had spent two years on land at Poole, before being purchased by Geoff in July.  Luckily we had Rick on board, who is also an electro-mechanical engineer, and he immediately got to work as I sailed the boat into Falmouth.  We left the boat there on Thursday evening and Geoff picked her up on Saturday to arrive back in Dartmouth at 0300 on Sunday morning.  Jackie had ferry glided her under power against the tide into a perfect berth, and as Geoff secured the second line to shore, the engine stopped again.  Bold Ex had loyally kept going for as long as was needed before taking a much earned rest.  And we all went home.

Home and - ready for a bath

I woke up this morning in the dark, stirring sleepily and found the lee-cloth had fallen down, but I wasn’t ready to get up and didn’t want to fall out, so I worked my way uphill to the windward side of my bunk and found in the pitch black dark, some hand sized shapes, of arm sized curves and warmth rolling over to me and a windy, wet voice whispering in my shell-like “I’m going to shave that scrobbly beard off tomorrow.” 

In all my forty days and forty nights at sea on Bold Explorer, I had never come across anything like it.

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