Sailing (too) fast – part two – Blue Moon's trip around the UK

Part One saw us hightailing it out of Carlingford Lough under engine in the face of a forecast 4 knot southerly. As has been the case all week this turns out to have been nonsense, it came on to blow a full 8 knots from the South East which was enough for Roger to insist on the asymmetric spinnaker (full disclosure – I love it even more than he does) so up it goes and we are cracking along at over 7 knots towards Strangford Lough. The sun is out, the Mountains of Mourne are a mile away and looking utterly gorgeous, we have hand ground coffee from the Algerian Coffee Stores, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

Except that we are doing 7 knots, 8 when the wind puffs up a bit. The entrance to Strangford Lough is about 30 miles away. It is 1200, a bit earlier than we planned to leave for reasons previously explained. Strangford Lough is famous for many things, chief among them its Narrows, where the largest inland thing of water in the British Isles empties itself through a channel five miles long and half a mile wide twice a day, resulting in tides of 8 knots which they use to generate electricity. You don’t go with this, let alone against it, as it is full of rocks, whirlpools and other things unfriendly to yachts. You wait for low water and go in on the first of the flood, or not at all. This occurs today at 1830. Been doing the maths? Good, then you will have worked out that we will arrive about two hours early.

This presents a dilemma. Unlike Carlingford, Strangford has no nice bays in which to drink tea while waiting for the tide. So the choice is that we go into a small harbour along the way for an hour or two, which involves rigging lines and fenders and whatnot, or we slow down. I insist on the latter. We take down the spinnaker – six knots. We put two reefs in the main – five knots. Still an hour ahead of schedule. So we spend most of the afternoon sailing the wrong way in an attempt to kill time. We gybe into Dundrum Bay and take a very long look at Newcastle. We study its golf course and secondary school and beaches. We gybe back and look at some things so unremarkable they aren’t on the map.

Roger was not born to sit on a boat which is not travelling at its maximum velocity. To be honest, neither was I. We try challenging each other on trivia and looking things up on the internet but we can’t escape the urge to go faster. Finally we are the required amount behind where we were, and head for Strangford Narrows. Then the wind dies. Instantly, we are behind schedule again, with the prospect of coming up the Narrows with eight knots of tide trying to hurl us onto some rock or other. We take one look at each other and this time I am ahead of him. The big pink symmetrical spinnaker is up before he can say ‘S1 please’ (that makes me sound like a real racer). Now we are back ahead of schedule but we don’t care. At 8 knots through the water we can buck the last of the ebb. We’re from Itchenor, we’ve crossed bars with our kites up, suddenly we have no fear of tide.

Well I have to say I think we ended up looking rather glam. We gybed off St Patrick’s Isle, cleared the Bar Pladdy, roared between Angus Rock and Black Island, laughed in the face of the Narrows as its paltry two knots tail-of-ebb stream met our fearless eight knots broad reach.

This is not a particularly interesting picture but it does prove that I am not telling porkies. Assuming that you can identify the shoreline.

Then the tide begins to turn. Elsewhere in the world this takes an hour or so. Here, five minutes. Suddenly we are doing 8 knots over the ground, then nudging 10. Strangford village and the ferry are getting bigger by the second. Our planned anchorage is just around the corner, and whilst five minutes ago it was 20 minutes away it is now less than five minutes away.

Roger has sensibly given me the helm for this rocky escapade, so the crewing credit is all his. The spinnaker is down the hatch, the pole is stowed, the sheets are clipped onto the boat, the engine is on, the boathook is out and the mooring picked up with at least 30 seconds to spare before we are swept into the Lough with nowhere for supper. The gasps of admiration can be heard from the Isle of Man (30 miles away, we discovered in a dull moment earlier). The boys from Itchenor have arrived.