Friday 24th July 2020 – Old Grimsby to Porthcressa to Arklow, Eire

Had a good night’s sleep and this morning motored over to Porthcressa to re-stock with fresh meat and veg. The weather forecast for the Isles of Scilly isn’t looking great so we took the decision to head north, may as well be sailing and get soaked as sit at anchor getting wet.

The wind direction is OK for heading to Peel, IOM, so we have planned a route with a few contingencies along the way.

About 2 miles off the coast of St Mary’s we saw the top half of large shark floating up towards the surface, its dorsal fin was out of the water. We got a clear view of it’s face, and noticed its unusually large eyes, the two-thirds of its torso we saw was approximately 5ft long. Not knowing much about shark identification we looked it up on the internet and the nearest thing we found was a Porbeagle Shark, the colouring was certainly right for one. Row attempted to video it but instead got a great shot of her boot!

The sailing for the first 24 hours was fabulous. We didn’t actually get any rain only drizzle. At one point we got up to 11.1 kts Speed Over Ground. The only time we ran the engine was to recharge the batteries. The auto pilot was needing more power than normal to keep us on track through the massive (for us) waves. The solar panels are brilliant when the sun is out.

The sea state was considerably different to that forecast, we consistently had large rolling waves of 3 to 4 metres and often in excess of 4 meters.

The dolphins loved these and we saw numerous pods of common and also bottlenosed dolphins of all sizes swimming alongside the boat throughout the passage.

There was very little shipping to keep out of the way of during the night, and we didn’t see any other sailing vessels. Artie came and snuggled up to whoever was on night watch, and spent all daylight hours sleeping in his box.

At 1500hrs on Saturday the coastguard put out a notice to small vessels in the area warning of gale force 7 winds due late Saturday night through to the early hours of Sunday. We decided that the high waves we were already experiencing were enough for us and as we had enjoyed a brilliant sail why spoil it. So we changed course away from IOM and headed for one of our contingencies, Arklow in Eire. This meant a change of ensign to Red as we weren’t sure how well a defaced Blue with Army burgee would be received and of course the Eire courtesy flag was flown.

The Irish coastline is somewhere in the mist, the sky is black with rays of light trying to creep through and we also have a rainbow, all we need is snow and we’ll have the full set.

We had already contacted the harbour master who was happy for us to take refuge, but said we would have to stay on the boat because the lockdown rules weren’t too clear at the moment. So if we can go ashore we’ll stop an extra night and take a look around Arklow, if not, and the conditions are good for sailing, we’ll continue heading either for Peel as originally planned, or Dublin. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.