Blue Moon's trip around the UK

Today was not as sad a day as I had anticipated. Yes, it dawned grey, cold and miserable. And I mean dawned, because High Water was 0800 and I had to be out of the marina at 0700. Yes, I took my last ever photos of the Three Graces from the boat:

Yes, I was yet again patronised by Mersey VTS (this time, to an outgoing ship: “no other outbound traffic except a small 10 metre sailing yacht, the Blue Moon”. You’ve said she’s 10 metres, it’s for others to judge whether or not that’s small!). But in due course the sun came out, there was enough breeze to sail most of the way to Conwy without wearing any thermals and only using the engine half the time, and best of all I survived the Rock Channel.

The Rock Channel does seem to have generated some amusement, intrigue and even a dash of concern amongst the readers of the multi-award-winning blog. Quite right too – to quote just one pilot guide it “should only be attempted with local knowledge.  There are at least a dozen charted wrecks around this short cut – so you are warned!!” And now I am smug enough to consider myself a Liverpool Local, having spent long enough sampling Bluepoint Marine’s coffee to have enquired whether, in spite of my obvious accent, I might be local enough to have a go at it. I was treated to half an hour of detailed briefing on the intricacies of the New Brighton shoreline, followed by further bonus tips on most ports in the Irish Sea I might visit in the next few days. I was tempted to counter that my knowledge of New Brighton had already been extended by a trip to see Tate Britain’s excellent exhibition of British political and activist photography of the ’80s which featured some wonderful images from Martin Parr’s The Last Resort which was shot there, but decided to bite my London tongue.

(Full disclosure: Sarah is the photography buff in our house. I had never heard of Martin Parr. But I did buy tickets for the show as I am an ’80s cultural throwback).

As it happens the Rock Channel was a bit of a damp squib. First of all the patronising VTS lady didn’t bat an audible eyelid when I proudly announced over the radio that I was “outbound via the Rock Channel”, then a large windfarm boat cut across ahead of me and charged through at 20 knots so I could simply follow his track on the chartplotter, and in the event it never got shallower than seven metres. There were some fun moments when the echo sounder suddenly went from seven to 1.5 and I slammed on the handbrake, even though mysteriously we hadn’t run aground, only to remember that a particularly arcane part of the briefing was that the channel gets so rough in big westerlies that it’s made the bottom look like a mogul field which can play havoc with echo sounders.

And then it was all over and the sun came out, although it would take more than that for the Wirral and the Dee Estuary to look anything other than flat., dull and grey in contrast to the hills and then mountains of North Wales beyond. In fact it looked like being rather a nice day’s sail, but as Roger so helpfully messaged me as I finally stopped gripping the wheel with Rock Channel Fear, “misery makes better copy than joy”. So I was left to try other means of providing entertaining content for the multi-award-winning blog, all of which failed.

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Putting the spinnaker up and playing a game of chicken to see how close I could get to one of the thousand-odd wind turbines that cover the shallows between Liverpool and Colwyn Bay seemed a dead cert for disaster, but I discovered that playing chicken on your own isn’t much fun as I simply went as close as I dared, and I had read that by law all the turbine blades have to be higher than Blue Moon’s mast, so disaster was never on the cards. (The law doesn’t specifically mention Blue Moon, I interpolated that fact from the minimum height being 21 metres, if you’re interested).

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Great Orme Head is a very strange feature, being a sort of mini-mountain semi-island joined to the rest of the coast by a flat isthmus on which they decided, disappointingly, to build Llandudno. I once tried to get the family to walk around Great Orme Head one New Year holiday but was shouted down and we went ten pin bowling instead, and then to Nando’s. So I was pleased to have another piece of dangerous local knowledge which was to get as close to Great Orme as possible, and before the tide turned, so as to avoid being stuck there all day in a contrary tide race.

However, this also didn’t end in disaster, even though I got to within what felt like touching distance and just after the tide turned, but it did give the tourists on the most un-Welsh sounding Marine Drive something to look at. I also realised how sensible it had been to go to Nando’s as the path around the Head was ridiculously steep, and full of campervans sounding as if they were practising for the Monaco Grand Prix, We did miss out on visiting the most Victorian lighthouse I have ever seen though:

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My final act of deliberately courting disaster was to attempt to enter the Conwy RIver an hour after Low Water, in spite of severe warnings from all pilot books that first-timers should only do so within an hour of High Water. My Liverpudlian informants had scoffed at this notion, and openly questioned why I had gone to Bootle and back to replace my lift keel hydraulic pipe if I wasn’t going to use it. So I ignored the sensible cruiser who had anchored off to await the tide and muscled in, finger on keel up button. Sadly that left no fingers to take pictures, except this one of the fabulous tunnel/corniche combo the A55 goes through which you would laugh at on a Scalextric track as being too preposterous for the Dolomites, let alone North Wales:

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The channel turned out to be more heart-in-mouth than expected, as the tide was rather stronger than I’d calculated, relying on it being Neaps (non-sailors: the bit of the tidal cycle when the tides are suppoed to be a bit namby-pamby. The opposite is Springs, when they are terrifying if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time), so that even in tickover I was being dragged through sandbanks at two or three knots. But even then the drama was minimal: I did wander out of the channel and briefly touched the bottom, but the brand new pipe did its hydraulic thing and we were soon back in what passes for deep water around here.

But then the local knowledge failed me, since having arrived at the marina entrance an hour and a half before the non-lift-keelers, I was confronted by a tidal cill that only opens when there’s enough water, so I had to sit and wait on a rather dingy pontoon outside. I was ridiculously proud of ferrygliding into a tiny gap on the pontoon in such a hosing tide, but the only people watching were two urchins who should have been in school but were mucking around in a motorboat they had probably stolen.

And to rub it in, when the cill did open, while I was untying my lines and rearranging fenders, the bastard sensible cruiser who had been anchored outside came up the river without scraping his keel on anything and nipped in ahead of me.

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Finally, though, the last laugh goes to the non-local, and whilst, had it been otherwise, it would have been excellent multi-award-winning blog fodder, I am pleased to say that I have beaten the locals. My specific advice on Conwy was to go to what I was assured was Wales’ finest fish and chip shop, and what better way to kick off the sailing summer? And to be properly authentic, they assured me, I should go past the marina and tie up on the quay with the fishermen. This is the bit I ignored, as I liked their follow-up advice ” if you must go into the marina, it has really nice showers.”

As it was, having cheated the tide if not the tide cill, I made it to the chip shop a mere three minutes after it closed, and not only does it win awards for quality of fish and (especially) chips, it also wins for customer service in that they cheerfully served me. As I wandered back down the quay to enjoy what certainly could be Wales’ best fish and chips (it’s only the second Welsh fish and chips I have ever eaten, rather oddly, so i can’t judge) I spotted a similarly-sized cruiser tied up where my ‘locals’ would have had me authentically stay. He too had a lifting keel, but was still firmly aground. Had I gone past the marina, I would have had the terrible-at-the-time-but-entertaining-to-write-about-in-hindsight experience of motoring around in the channel, watching people eat their fish and chips whilst being unable to get there myself before they stopped serving.

But I didn’t. On the one hand, I got the fish supper. On the other, any multiple award winning has gone out of the blog window by the second post.

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