Blue Moon's trip around the UK

I’d imagined making Holyhead a pitstop too, but since I was meeting Roger off the train on Friday night I found myself staying the whole day. What a strange experience.

I’d known well in advance that Holyhead’s marina had been destroyed in a gale five years ago. I’d checked before coming and knew that they were still operating but all they had was what they called a landing stage, the one bit left of the old marina, and that there was a problem with planning permission to rebuild the pontoons. But the website looked smart and promised showers, toilets and a warm welcome.

I wasn’t expecting something as barren as this:

This is all that’s left. The boat on the right is a wind farm support boat, and behind me was one bloke in a small yacht. I went ashore to check in and pay but the tiny office was all locked up. Next door the sailing club was buzzing – boats on moorings, a trot boat running people to and fro. “No one in?” they said, unsurprised. “You should have picked up one of our moorings.” But I didn’t want to spend the day stuck on a mooring, or to have to get the dinghy out to go back when their trot boat finished. So I got the shower code from small yacht bloke, cooked a curry smelly enough to impress Roger with my on-board cooking two days later and went to bed.

Next day no-one. Sailing club buzzing, kids learning to sail, excellent chandlery so I could sort out my non-charging phone-cum-chartplotter issues, restaurant, cafe – everything you’d expect in a marina except, well, the marina. A lovely sunny day bimbling the boat not beating into the cold F5 northerly, but no-one to pay and I was feeling bad because they must need the money and I had had two showers and lots of their electricity. I was just heading off to do some sightseeing on the way to the station (a minute is all you need to see all Holyhead’s sights) when I saw people in the office. I went in, and met the poor sod who owns the marina.

“Sorry”, he said, “we were in town celebrating Holyhead’s becoming a Free Port”. Uh-oh. “Is that this Rishi Sunak wheeze where you can you have slaves legally and not pay any taxes?”. I asked, trying not to sound too cynical or socialist, and failing. “Yes, that’s it!” he replied, excitedly, “and my God we need it. We’ve lost the factory and the nuclear power station.” I didn’t make the obvious joke Oscar Wilde would have done, mainly because he’d warmed to his theme now, and began to explain how Stena the ferry people had sold the harbour to a developer from Canary Wharf who cared nothing for the town and was letting everything go to rack and ruin. And the more he went on the sadder it all got.

He pointed out the rather spooky gothic ruins I had been wondering about which presented a sort of Scooby-Doo backdrop to my landing stage berth.

Apparently this was an English-country-house-meets-Alpine Victorian folly built by the engineer who built the harbour breakwater. It took 35 years to build (the breakwater) and to persuade his wife to leave Vienna and live in Holyhead for 35 years he had to build her the castle of her dreams. Canary Wharf Man bought this too, but when it caught fire and burned down he left it to rot.

Conscious that Roger’s train was now past the aforementioned Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch I was trying to sidle to the door but now he moved on to the night Storm Emma wrecked his marina before his eyes, along with 80 of his customers’ boats, how before then he had 350 yachts and many visitors bringing custom to the town, and how the developer had refused him planning permission to rebuild it, how the town council and the local MP had failed to get him to budge on any local issues. Finally he finished and I had forgiven him his Free Port and I was feeling truly sorry for all of Holyhead as well as the marina (a feeling only exacerbated by the walk to the station and back). When you’re stuck on the far corner of Anglesey you need all the help you can get, and in the absence of being able to open a factory or call centre the least I could do was pay him. But he didn’t have the keys to the till, so I filled out a form and he promised they would send me the details.

It’s Monday now and I still haven’t heard anything. I tried phoning but no answer. It’s not too late to catch the train to Dublin and the fast cat back to Holyhead and pay him. Perhaps I should.