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Day 1
So another series of firsts for myself and Gordon. The plan was to leave Conwy on Friday night at 10.00, sail overnight to Port St. Mary - Isle of Man and return overnight on Sunday night. I went over to Deganwy early on the Friday morning and found it was blowing a hooly. At least force 6 possibly 7 (westerly) and my first thoughts were “there is no way the NWCC will be setting off for IOM in this”. I checked the forecast and it was supposed to be blowing 3-4 occasional 5 and dropping off overnight. I had a few jobs to do around the house and when Gordon turned up at midday it was still blowing a gail. The NWCC briefing was planned to be at 20.00 in the club house. We planned to go along anyway to find out what the alternate plan was.
We had “fish and peas” at the Mulberry in Conwy and arrived at the Club to find out that the cruise was indeed on. The wind had dropped a little but the latest forecast was uncertain, 4-5 possible 6 later. Sea state moderate to rough in the south. Well we were going North. Anyway we charged back to the boat and were heading out of the Marina at about 21.10 in good time to get to the Fairway buoy for the 22.00 start.
There have recently been a couple of issues with the half tide gate at The Quay resulting in all the water draining out of the Marina one evening earlier in the week. This is not a major issue to us as Diablo is designed to happily sit on the bottom sitting on the lifted keel and the twin rudders. But there were some boats that did end up leaning against the pontoons and suffering some small superficial damage. The word from the Marina is that a log had got stuck in the gate.
Anyway we were heading towards the gate in the semi light at 21.15 to find that there were 3 red lights on indicating that the gate was closed. We pulled Diablo into a spare berth and called the marina on channel 80 and received no response. I managed to raise them on the mobile to be told that the gate was broken and was not going to be lowered until the following day as there were no staff available who understood how to make it work. By my calculations there should now have been about a meter and a half of water over the gate which would probably have been enough for us to get out witht eh keel down. As it was we ended up backing out of the marina and Gordon wizzed the keel up about 20 yards before the gate and then wizzed it down again (100 turns with the winch handle) as soon as we were out in the River.
It was by this time pretty dark with a spring tide running into the river. So I edged us very carefully up the river towards the channel where a couple of the other boats were already in the channel heading towards the fairway. It was pretty lumpy and windy heading out for the line so we put up a heavily reefed main sail and about 2/3rds of the Genoa and headed off for the IOM on a course provided for us by the Laptop running Seapro.
The whole experience of an overnight passage is something completely different. There is a small amount of ambient light but you can’t really see the set of your sails you really have to feel the boat and it’s movement through the waves. We could see the other boat’s lights and check on their progress. every now and again an enormous set of lights looking like a christmas tree would appear on the horizon and move quickly across our projected course. You go the distinct feeling that they new we were there and were making allowances for our course. Given my problems with colours (I am red/green colour blind) I really needed Gordon to interpret what these boats were and which direction they were heading in. We were crossing the main route into Liverpool from the Atlantic so I suppose it should not be a surprise that there was that much shipping about.
The boat was heaving about quite a bit and I did succumb to the old mal de mer at about 5 in the morning. We had originally planned to take turns at watches but given the nature of the weather and the amount of shipping about we decided to stick it out until we arrived in Port St Mary. I did manage to catch a couple of warm up naps once the sun came up.
We arrived, without any mishaps in Port St Mary at about 7am. We had chosen to turn the engine on for the last mile or so to save having to tack to get into the harbour entrance. This disqualified us from the race, but by this time I was cold, wet and tired and could not have cared less. We were in bed by 09.30 and spent pretty much the next 18 hours catching up on our lost sleep. We went for a short walk into Port St Mary and had dinner on the boat. Our plan was to eat and then drop into the Port St Mary Yacht Club for a few drinks. Because we had eaten quite early we decided to get a nap before going to the club. Neither of us woke again until 2 in the morning when the wind started to blow and we got up to check the lines and the rigging.
Day 2/3?
So we woke up Sunday morning feeling refreshed and clear headed. The forecast was for a sunny day with winds 4 to 5, possible 6, from the North West. During the previous evening various doom mongers in the fleet had talked about how the wind was going to build during the following days. Quite a few of the crews had decided to leave the return journey until the following Wednesday which was forecast to be sunny with a big high settling over the country. Overnight Gordon and I had independently decided to get off as soon as we could on Sunday Morning provided the forecast wasn’t too bad. On the trip over we had managed quite well with the force 6 and moderate seas. We could have waited till Tuesday but didn’t really want to. Sunday felt like a window and so we went for it on the basis if that it was too rough after an hour or so we could always turn round and head back.
As it happened we had a fantastic sail back. We had a 15 knot wind on our starboard rear quarter the whole way and we did the 58 miles in just under 10 hours. So we pretty much averaged 6 knots the whole way across. In fact we arrived in Deganwy a bit too early for the gate and had to stem the spring tide in the River whilst we waited for them to open the gate.
So a Series of Firsts.
Our first overnight passage - Quite enjoyed this but would be a bit more selective about the weather in future.
Our first unaccompanied passage out of sight of land.
Our first trip to a land mass other than the mainland or Anglesey.
A Great Weekend.
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