Blue Moon's trip around the UK

I mentioned in the last post that we were now in Big Tide Country, and that’s why we found ourselves forced to leave Peel before the lock opened next morning: we had decided that rather than our original plan of sailing the mere 45 miles to Holyhead we would do the full 70 to Caernarfon, and Caernarfon has a bar which you can only cross three hours before High Water, and to get there at 2000 (HW-3) we had to leave at 0600.

This plan had been the subject of some debate: the cautious Skipper was all in favour of a shorter trip ending in a harbour that was secure in all conditions and had no tide constraints; the more adventurous Mate pointed out that since there was absolutely nothing to do in that safe harbour once we got there, we may as well get up early and go all the way South. He was, of course, right: Holyhead was probably the least enjoyable port of call on the whole trip and neither of us wanted to go back, and the forecast for the next few days was looking windier and even more dead-on-the-nosier. But it did mean spending the whole day looking at our watches, working out our likely ETA based on tides that we were mainly guessing at since the top end of Anglesea has all manner of odd tidal streams which could push us south massively or not at all.

The answer was in fact massively, and where we had expected to have to motor from Holyhead onwards we managed to sail most of the way with a bit of engine in the shipping lanes in an attempt to follow the rules and get across ASAP. It was nonetheless a very long day, and there are only so many breakfasts and lunches you can eat in one day (a fair few, in my case, but still…).

Arriving off the bar nearly an hour early meant that Roger could show off his local knowledge by piloting us into a tiny anchorage off the very Welsh-named Ynys Llanddwyn. Only as we arrived did he explain that his intimate relationship with the place came from having swum there naked, not so long ago either. This fact was shocking enough without the photographic evidence provided unbidden. I gather the island is no longer inhabited.

Thankfully the cold drizzle dampened any thought of skinny-dipping and the anchorage was close enough for us to start our approach to the Caernarfon Bar bang on time. I’d been looking forward to this for years having read about the treacherous sandbanks that change the whole time, so the harbourmaster has to keep moving the buoys marking the channel, and we’d spent the evening before writing down each one’s details in a proper Pilotage Plan like they teach you at navigation school. Sadly it turned out that the easier approach is to bung them into your chart plotter, so that even as it got dark we could follow the channel without any drama. The only trouble was that the updated chart on the harbour website stopped as soon as we were in the Menai Strait bit, which was when the buoys started being in totally ridiculous places up mudbanks and under the floodlit castle, involving a couple of squeaky-bum handbrake turns, ending up with shooting through a tiny gap in Caernarfon’s ancient sea wall whilst being swept past on the 3 knot tide in pitch darkness. It reminded me very much of that excellent video game Frogger, but potentially even more expensive.

I went to the office to check in and met the very helpful and chatty Iwan (pronounced Ewan), who has the oddest hours of any job since he only works when the tide is in, on this occasion 2000 – 0100, so he can guide people in to the dock. Having chatted away in his nice dry office for long enough for Roger to have finished tidying up the boat in the pouring rain, I left and he handed me his card with phone numbers in case there was an emergency outside High Water, at which point I came within a millisecond of making even more of an arse of myself than usual.

Luckily I decided not to compliment him on his sense of humour, but for a whole day actually genuinely thought he was having a laugh and wanted to be called Doc Fictoria in the way that Martin Clunes was called Doc Marten. Then I saw a bilingual road sign and the penny dropped: Doc Fictoria is the Welsh for Victoria Dock which is where the marina is. Although I suspect it was actually called Victoria Dock first: Caernarfon made Aberystwyth look positively lazy in its Welshness – everyone in pubs and shops greeted you in Welsh first, and we were often the only people speaking English.

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We really liked Caernarfon as it turned out to be everything Holyhead isn’t: small, neat, charming, buzzy; full of interesting restaurants, coffee shops and nice pubs; friendly locals, steam trains, views of sea and mountains, and of course the most famous castle in Wales. This was just as well as another session poring over charts and tide tables, and then doing the sensible and easy thing and asking Iwan his advice, confirmed that trying to get anywhere else (such as Conwy) on the way to Liverpool was a non-starter as we would have to come and go on the same tide. So we stayed put in Caernarfon, and had a thoroughly jolly time. This included, variously….

…spending more time in yet another castle than I could possibly imagine, not being a particular fan of castles, but Caernarfon’s is epic. None of this namby-pamby Scottish is-it-a-castle-is-it-a-Victorian-house business, this is a proper fighting castle that you could play games in if it was a model and you were six years old and had loads of Airfix knights looking for a run-out. It has four portcullises! Multi-angle crossbow-shooting places that covered all the coffee shops! Bits for pouring boiling oil down! Dungeons! Flags! Towers! Dozens of towers, I know, because Roger made me climb most of them before I managed to persuade him they were all the same.

…visiting the oldest yacht club in the world, the Royal Welsh. Not so much the oldest club as the oldest clubhouse, having been built by Edward I in 1287. Not that he knew it was going to be a yacht club, he thought it would make a good gate house but he’d obviously turned the wrong page in the Airfix instruction book.

They were having a quiz night so we went along and endeared ourselves to our hosts by being very obviously visitors from England and then beating them at the quiz. Edward would have been proud.

…climbing up Snowdon, just for fun. This seemed like quite a good idea since Roger had done the homework and found a steam train to take us to one side and a bus to bring us home from the other. What the homework hadn’t prepared us for was how all of North West England would be doing the same thing, so we found ourselves actually queuing to get anywhere near the top, and spent the most of the day listening to banter and accents as wide ranging as Wallasey to Wigan.

It may qualify on height but a little sad that my only technical Munro of the trip isn’t one as it’s in Wales. And has a train going up it.

…finding a shop where they sold soap that looks like cheesecake and bubble bath that looks like cupcakes. They don’t have one of those in Holyhead.

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Finally to The Swellies. In case you’re wondering, this is the very narrow bit of the Menai Strait between and under the two bridges. It’s famous for being completely full of nasty rocks except for a tiny channel near the shore, which involves lots of lining up transits and moving this way and that to keep in the channel. It’s also the home of fierce tides so unless you live there you’re only supposed to go through it in the half hour each day when the tide goes slack, which rather confusingly is not at High Water. It’s so complicated that there are pages of advice in most books: my copy of Cruising Anglesea (OK Tom’s copy he kindly lent me) has a whole chapter which often contradicts itself.

Well, all I can say is that the authors haven’t been to Scotland. At no point could we actually touch any of the rocks, although I have to admit that not being able to see them either made a bit of a difference, and for once I got the tide right so we only had a knot or so with us as we went through.

Roger skilfully avoids a range of Swellies, and two bridges

Because of the need to go through at High Water Slack, this was another example of frustrating tides as wherever we went now the tide would be against us, so we sensibly went nowhere and had planned to take advantage of a range of football and rugby matches to have an excellent Boys’ Sunday, albeit at anchor at the bleak end of the Menai Strait off the other Bangor. Then we spotted moorings off Menai Bridge and on a whim phoned the harbourmaster who told us we could have one for the night, so we did and treated ourselves to a run ashore to make up for a day of motoring for exactly an hour.

Menai Bridge was a very pleasant surprise, and we could see why Thomas Telford decided to put his bridge there, although I imagine opening the map and seeing a town called Menai Bridge would give even a world famous engineer a clue. In addition to a relevant name it has more pubs than stricly necessary, a Michelin-starred fish restaurant (sadly we’d eaten), the best bakery since Mallaig and the first Waitrose since Chichester. Extraordinary, although less relevant to Telford of course since as everyone knows they only ventured north of Watford about twenty years ago.

It also gave us the chance to see why people who haven’t recently been through the Sound of Luing or Strangford Narrows or the Gulf of Corryvreckan might get unnerved by the strength of the tide:

It also gave me my last chance this trip to take a mildly interesting picture of my boat from a new angle, in this case looking at Menai Bridge from the Menai Bridge.

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