Illustrations

"We joined the navy to see the sea/ And what did we see? We saw the sea!" as the song goes plus occasional things like this (on the left) which is a buoy moored a few miles off the Irish coast. These things all have resonant names, this one is called the Skulmartin,are much bigger than they appear until you get close, this one is about 6 metres high. It's round top tells a passing mariner that you can safely leave it either side. They need a fair bit of maintenance which is done by an ancient body called Trinity House who get around in their smart ship which can pluck this thing out of the water, clean it up, repaint it and put it back.

The pretty small marina on the right is at Portaferry in the narrows leading to Strangford Lough, the tides here run up to 7 knots and are now used to generate electricity via an underwater turbine. It was finished quite recently. This marina is under the charge of John Murray , a real gentleman who occasionally swops his jeans and jumper for the more conspicuous orange suit and white helmet as cox'n of the local inshore lifeboat, a big RIB (Rigid Inflatable), a spectacular craft which can zoom around at 25knots plus. It's a very impressive sight at full chat and John and his crew exude that air of invincible competence which is the hallmark of the RNLI everywhere. British yachtsmen have to go abroad to find out how good our lifeboat service is, noticeably better than even our nearest neighbours across the North Sea and the channel. And all entirely financed by voluntary contributions and mostly manned by unpaid volunteers.

I surface at last

At last! I have been able to get a signal on my wireless modem and also manage to down load a photo. I don't want to excite you too much so I will restrict myself this time to this one, which was my lunch some time ago, actually election day I think. This communications revolution which is supposed to put me in instant touch with the world wherever the wind blows me has proved to be not quite up to snuff. However, today I am in Bangor, that's the Irish one not the welsh. It's a busy seaside place about 10 miles from Belfast. It is humming today because it's their summer maritime festival. The crowds around the sea front as always are quite a shock after the solitude of the open ocean.

I stopped herebecause I have the inevitable problems with my old barky and needed a spare part which I knew would be available here. I also needed to consult a doctor because I thought I had broken my neck! Literally I mean. I had a tumble in my dinghy while attaching a line to a mooring buoy and developed a distinct pain in the neck. However the nice nurse with a very attrractive Ulster accent assuredcme that it was merely a muscle sprain. I have an enforced layover until Monday because my spare part has to be delivered from Belfast.

I have been pondering about the importance of tides to seafarers who choose to rely on the wind for power. Modern sailors in powerful motor driven vessels don't worry about them much, but to a slow old boat like mine, two knots of tide can make a big difefrence. If it's with you, your speed might be 7 knots, if it's against you 3 knots, less than half! Of course every schoolboy knows that the tide is influenced by the moon and rises to high water twice a day. If you ever had a seaside holiday you could hardly escape that observation. But it's a lot more complex than that in fact. Although the rhythm is fairly fixed, the height of the tide varies every day, every week, every month and every year. This vast mass of water flows in and out of the Irish Sea, through its northern and southern entrances in a complicated patterm determined by the geography and the nature of the sea bed. Fortunately, generations of hard working surveyors have spent wholeworking lives charting this complex patterm so that the modern sailor has access to all the secrets for a few quid spent on a tidal atlas. Observing these ever changing movements of the waters a romantic like me can see it all as the breathing of some underwater giant. now shallow, now deep.

Northern Ireland is a delightful place, a well kept secret for most English people, but it's not Scotland and my arrival here is not getting me around the UK. My chances of being in Orkney by midsummer are fading, but someone said somewhere that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive. I am not sure that I agree with that principal but I am still travelling hopefully and, perhaps more important, happily!

Election Fever

The fully illustrated version of this blog will, I am afraid, have to be postponed. I am having difficulty in downloading the photos I have taken. However I spent election day becalmed in the middle of the Irish Sea, a wierd experience, a sort of limbo. I entertained myself with George Elliot and bit of fishing, catching two fat mackerel which were filleted, fried and on my lunch plate within 30 minutes of swimming happily about. Hopefully they had no hint of their fate. When the wind did stir, it was a mere zephyr from the north which pushed me very slowly towards Ireland so that I arrived of this village of Ardglass at about midnight. As always in these situations when trying to make sense of the various lights which mark the dog leg channel, I remembered that my colour vision is not very good. "Is that really a green?" I ask myself "or perhaps a white?" Reds usually stand out pretty clearly. When at last I could see an empty berth in the marina in the pale moonlight it was a considerable relief. Parking my old barky is a bit like getting a 40 ton artic into your back garden, I really needed a helping hand on the dock, not to be expected at 1am. Finally tied up safely I felt that I had earned a dram.

My neice Pauline said that this blog needs more pictures, so here's two of "Christabel & Sheila" still languishing in her winter berth (with my bike in the background). Hopefully this will be her last night of repose. We leave at 0630 tomorrow, the wind is fair for Scotland, if this high pressure persists for another day or two the next stop might be Islay. Morrison's shelves are bare and I will not be looking for a grocery store for at least two weeks. It will take almost three hours to get through the lock and down the river to the sea and, for me, that's when the holiday starts. I will breathe a huge sigh of relief when I pass the outer buoy.

Dreams

"Six days shalt thou labour and do all that thou art able/And on the seventh day holystone the decks and overhaul the cable" is typical black humour of the old sailing navy. Both the tasks are seriously hard work and provide no sabbath leisure. "The cable" then was a huge rope 6 inches in diameter and 200 yards long to which the anchor was attached. Overhauling was to inspect, clean and repair it. My boat "Christabel & Sheila", like most modern vessels has her anchor attached to a length of chain, in my case 50 metres of it. Like any metal object on a boat it tends to quietly rust away in its damp locker. Today I hauled it out on deck, chipped off the rusty bits painted it with linseed oil and restowed it. As I sat on deck engaged in this mucky job, I day dreamed of gliding into the calm water of a remote uninhabited Scottish loch and dropping anchor and chain into the glass clear water and relaxing in the cockpit with a wee dram. Bring it on!

Great timing!

Amazing that BBC2 should choose this week to show a group of irresistably charming kids reciting the cruising sailors anthem by John Masefield "I must go down to the sea again, the lonely sea and the sky" just at the time when I am getting ready to go down to the sea. If you didn't catch it, watch it on iPlayer, it's worth a years licence fee on its own even if you are no sailor.

Boats have masts primarily to hang the sails on but there is a tendency to put other things up there too, like wind vanes and lights. When something goes wrong aloft someone has to go up and fix it. In a crewed boat there is a tendency, at this stage, for people to hang back waiting for someone else to volunteer a bit like the opening of an episode of "The Apprentice". In fact the ascent is not difficult when there is some muscle available to do the hoisting. Singlehanded sailors have to find some way to get up there under their own steam and adopt various ploys. Dame Ellen McArthur's boat is so big that she is apparently able to climb up the sliding shackles which connect the mainsail to the mast. I know she took a photo from up there looking down on her boat, but then she is not like ordinary mortal sailors, especially ones like me with rather too much mileage on the clock.

Being still in boating civilisation, I was able to delegate the job today by manouvring the boat under the yard crane which then hoisted Steve in a bosun's chair to unsort a tangle. I think he got the job because he is the youngest, he is certainly the lightest. The photo is from last year on another boat. The victim this time was also chosen for his youth (I think).