Blue Moon's trip around the UK

September is actually the cruellest month, and TS Eliot should have known this as I gather he was quite a keen sailor, another fun fact I only came across because of this blog. You can thank me later. Perhaps it’s not so cruel in New England, but in Olde Englande it’s a rotten month. You’ve had a lovely August, the sun is still out, you’ve had a cracking time at Burnham Week, you’ve finally got the boat going and you’re looking forward to some lovely warm early Autumn weekends as September lures you in and then it suddenly unleashes a wave of depressions on you with southerly gales and torrential rain as if it was suddenly winter. Not fair!

It turns out the same phenomenon occurs in the Irish Sea but with added cruelty: while soft Southerners are watching these depressions roll by to the North of us the poor sods up there in the North have them going over the top, and consequently don’t really know which way the wind is going to blow, or indeed if it will at all, until it’s right on top of them. And this year I am one of those poor Northern sods. Sitting in Carrickfergus Marina, watching the rain start and stop as if it was on a random light switch, I enjoyed the cheery manager’s observation that “you can tell it’s summer in Ireland as the rain’s warmer”. I wondered if agreeing 20th September as my arrival date into Liverpool Marina for the winter hadn’t been leaving it a bit too late.

Why Liverpool? Well, quite apart from the obvious attractions of being able to buy a Beatles T-shirt, mug, wig, stick of rock etc on every corner, it is only 2.5 hours door to door by train and bike from home to the marina, and in my experience of Parker ownership and its maintenance requirements that is better than schlepping up to Scotland with a toolkit every few weeks.

Why the 20th? Because Liverpool (and all of North Wales and North West England) is another land of big tides, and there are no safe harbours anywhere between Anglesea and Liverpool, so you have to get all the way there in one go (about an eight hour sail) to carry the tide up the Mersey to arrive at High Water, and the tide on the 20th was at 1500 so I’d ‘only’ have to get up at 0630. With me so far? Impressed by the planning?

But I had worked this out back in January, and the long range weather forecast isn’t so good nine months out.

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Lucky Roger had volunteered to be Northern Ireland Correspondent yet again; at least he knows his way around Belfast Airport now. A quick trip around Bangor (I had motored the five miles across Belfast Lough from Carrick as my gesture towards getting South) confirmed that summer was over: it was all very quiet as we enjoyed our final Maud’s and proper Guinness. The forecast agreed: there was a day of just plain windiness before a day of gales then the wind turning into the South – i.e. on the nose. Bum.

Gentle potter down the Irish Coast abandoned. Four days exploring the Isle of Man reduced to two and a half. Late night hitting the fleshpots of Bangor on a wet Monday: non-starter. Our first sail of the week began at 0530 and to my horror Autumn had arrived as it was pitch dark. First proper use of nav lights this trip. It was also disarmingly cold, on account of the lack of sunshine and quite beefy northerly wind. No complaints here though, except from the half of the crew who feels cheated if a spinnaker isn’t involved, as with 24 knots and a big following sea we were going quite fast enough to make it to Peel on the Isle of Man in time for lunch, and more importantly the rather narrow window around High Water when they open the lock gate. In fact our average speed of 7 knots was probably the highest of the trip so far, and I managed to take Roger’s mind off spinnakers by making him steer all the way. Raymond doesn’t like 24 knots and a following sea much. (Non-sailors: big waves from behind, aka ‘a following sea’, tend to grab the stern by the rudder and swing it off course. Seasoned sailors like me and Roger feel this in our bones and compensate before it happens. Yesterday’s not-quite-top-of-the-range autopilots like Raymond wait for it to happen and then panic, throwing the wheel around to compensate).

The sun did eventually crawl out, and on a clear day we yet again failed to make it out of sight of land, with bits of Scotland and the Mountains of Mourne making appearances before the Isle of Man itself. Roger had walked around it but I had no idea what to expect. It looks like this:

And then when you get closer it looks like this:

That’s right, in every (or should I say both?) big town, no matter how pretty, they build a power station right behind it so you know what a modern, buzzy, electrically-powered economy awaits. In Douglas this merely adds interest to the otherwise rather bland Brighton-esque facade of offshore investment, but in Peel it’s a bit of a shame as the rest of the town is very pretty, and it has a rather excellent ruined castle competing with the power station for attention. I recommend it to any Medway sailors feeling robbed of their castle/power-station-chimney childhood memories by the removal of the latter.

Arriving in Peel is also quite good fun: the harbourmaster welcomes you as if you are the only visitor that week (as if), meets you on the swing bridge he’s just swung open making crowds of people wait and gawp (IoM crowd = more than one person) and directs you to a berth right in front of the best fish restaurant in town. Sadly it’s connected to the land by a pontoon half a mile away, so it’s a bit like having your nose pressed up against Hamley’s window but the door locked. There are compensations: to get to town you have to walk past this sign:

Half a day turns out to be more than enough time to explore Peel very thoroughly, and indeed to do your shopping if you’re an islander as most shops were shut by 3.30 and the place felt oddly quiet – living up to its billing as feeling like the 1950s, but perhaps after the early warning sirens had gone off. At least there was no-one to spoil the photos of the rather quaint narrow streets.

Hurrah then for the Peveril Hotel which brought things bang up to date with Manx Pale Ale and tattooed locals arguing in the bar, contrasted with The Boatyard Restaurant’s September Lobsterfest. We felt we’d earned it.

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Faced with the forecast (southerly gales, now advertised a day earlier) we’d decided that spending even one night on the south coast of Man in an interesting but not so sheltered harbour was out of the question, so we only had a day and our options for exploring the island were bike or nothing. Bike it was, but I had forgotten that I was with someone who had once cycled the entire South Downs Way in a day, on a whim. Roger’s idea of a gentle tour involved 45 miles of surprisingly hilly touring on rental bikes a few sizes too small for us. Luckily there were views other than of Roger’s gears (he seemed to have rather more than me) and his bottom (no further remarks needed). The Isle of Man looked not unlike the hillier bits of Lancashire, without the motorways, mills or football teams. In other words, rather lovely.

That amount of physical exercise was very good for me, and it also meant we got to see a thing called the Laxey Wheel, about which we were stupidly excited because it turned out we had both had the same British Isles jigsaw when kids in which it played a commanding role out of proportion to its size or importance. Probably in the days before tax avoidance it was the most interesting thing on the island. It also gave Roger the chance to demonstrate his broad expertise in mining technology by spotting that it pumped water out of a mine even before we read the noticeboard.

We made it back to Peel before the rain, which came before the wind, and as any sailor knows, when the rain’s before the wind/then your tops’l halyards mind. Lacking a tops’l halyard, we minded the weather forecast instead which confirmed that it would indeed be very windy overnight but at least the following day would be a bit south-westerly, followed by alternating flat calm and dead southerlies. Anglesea is due south of the Isle of Man, so this was our one chance to get South: we had no alternative but to put on our oilies, call up the harbourmaster and ask him to let us out on that night’s High Water lock in a rainy gale so we could hang onto a waiting buoy outside ready to leave for Wales at low tide next morning.

He clearly thought we were mad, and so did we as we motored out at 2200 through an even more deserted harbour into a howling wind and pouring rain. But the buoys were slightly sheltered, and doing something so clearly nautically sensible made us feel like proper seadogs. Or so it does with ten days’ perspective; at the time it was just wet and cold and really windy.

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