Lundy 3rd - 6th September

[Deleted]

Katy is back!! At last!! Well, nearly. Hope to pick her up over the bank holiday.

Weather permitting I'm going to make another attempt at getting to Lundy on Sat 3rd Sept, returning on Tuesday 6th. Matt & Dean will be joining me. Haven't looked at tides etc yet, but any boats wishing to sail in company are welcome to join us.

Will post details later.

Julian.

[allan]

I'm off to see my Dad that weekend or I would have loved to join you. Have a great time.
Allan

[Deleted]

I've been watching the forecast and I'm beginning to take it personally! The wind is forecast to pick up and back to easterly almost exactly the time we would get to Lundy and ease off and veer westerly again almost exactly the time we would leave!!! The God's don't ever want me to get to Lundy!

Although as the week has gone on the Easterly component has been diminishing, so does anyone who has been to Lundy regularly have any idea what it would be like to be anchored (tucked in as close to Rat island as I could get) in 25-36mph winds from the south? Sleepless night?

Julian.

[Camelot]

As long as the wind hasn't got any east in it you'll sleep fine in landing bay. When we were there diving in June, the wind was from the south and fairly strong overnight (F5-ish I think); there was only a little boat movement - in fact for me just the right amount to rock me to sleep beautifully! I think my mates from work might have preferred it to be completely motionless, but they slept fine.

I've not tried it, but Jenny's Cove on the western side of Lundy is apparently secure if it is from the East.

[Deleted]

Thanks Huw. I'm getting the threat of mutiny amongst my crew even before we start! I think Dean is going to pull out because of the weather no matter how many comforting noises we make, but Matt will be reassured.

The Peter Cumberlidge pilot book mentions Jenny's Cove, but I remember talking about it with Tony Burris ages ago, and he said it was a no no. Unfortunately it was so long ago I can't remember exactly why, but I think it was something to do with the submerged rocks being very close and the anchor holding not perfect.

[Matt]

I don't mind doing the trip unless its constant rain. Looking forward to it. We have lots of beer and crisps anyway! It will be great to get away from the brown sea.

Matt

[Deleted]

Ah well, it looks as if Lundy is going to remain elusive. I can't take the mon/tuesday away from the business now and it looks as if there is going to be some serious weather on these days anyway.

Ho hum. I'll just have to start a petition to move Lundy a bit nearer!

Julian.

[Deleted]

Change of plan. We're just going to go to Swansea for the weekend, so if anyone wants to sail in company we're planning on locking out at 9am in the morning.

Julian.

[Deleted]

Swansea was indeed graced by a visit from Katy, with myself and Matt on board. Dean having dropped out because of the weather, as expected.

The weather was fickle, as always and instead of the force 3 or 4 with heavy rain that was forecast we had sunshine and were becalmed for a while around breaksea. There was bags of time before the tide turned, so we didn't bother to start my new super power engine, but instead made sandwiches while we drifted on the tide past that concrete thingy off Breaksea with 0 knots through the water and no steerage.

We were passing Port Talbot when the heavens opened and the torrential rain started. I abandoned my trademark leather jacket and donned fulll wet weather gear while Port Talbot disappeared. Not a bad thing, some would say! Visibility reduced to... well, it's hard to say as we couldn't see anything!

Now it might be useful to point out at this stage that I don't have a chart plotter, so we continued on the same compass bearing which should more or less intercept the marked channel into Swansea. A couple of hours must have gone by. Buoys were just vague silhouettes in the rain and only then when we were pretty near. Imagine our surprise when one of them started walking.

It took a few steps, stopped amd made a gesture like a fisherman casting a line. 'That's a person!', Matt exclaimed. 'Can't be. Unless they can walk on water!'

There shouldn't have been a buoy there, especially not one that can walk, and ahead were breaking waves, but as anyone familiar with that area knows, this is not unusual. There are lots of patches of breaking waves over the shallower bits, but this time there were rather a lot of them - and they looked alarmingly angrier than the others. Matt, who was on the helm at the time, did the sensible thing when you are not sure exactly where you are and appear to be heading into danger. He did a 180 and we retraced our steps. That is the only course we could be sure of being clear of obstructions, otherwise we'd have already hit them!

As we took our 'safe' course I plotted our position on the chart manually from my hand held GPS and we turned out to be too far to the right of the harbour entrance. We had been just about to go up the beach! With hindsight the gesture that the person on the beach made must have been to point towards the harbour, but in torrential rain with visibility of a couple of hundred yards a blurry shape could have been pointing anywhere!

The following morning was beautiful. We sat having coffee overlooking the marina, bathed in warm sunshine. It was still warm and sunny when we locked out, and the holidaymakers milling about in their T shirts must have thought we were mad as we went through the locks in our wet weather gear. But we had seen the forecast! More rain and high winds. Starting bad and gradually getting worse.

It started when we were less than half way across Swansea Bay. Wind speed shot up to 28kts, the rain started hammering down, anything even slightly loose was crashing onto the cabin floor and the weather on the VHF announced a gale warning for the Lundy area. Severe gale 9 imminent. Seas rough to very rough. (I'm glad now that I abandoned that trip!)

'We've got 7 or 8 hours of this', Matt said. He really knows how to cheer a person up! We sat there all set to tough it out like two miserable drowned rats.

Then it happened.

The wind dropped and the rain stopped. We could see squalls behind us, but much to our delight they went diagonally across the channel and disappeared inland. Then the whole horizon behind went clear and blue. Unfortunately the blue never caught us up. We were always under cloud, but the rain had stopped, the wind was sometimes under 10kts, usually 10-15kts, and the waves were not too bad. There we one or two patches where the approaching waves were about level with the top guard rail, obviously kicked up by the squalls, but Katy has been in a lot worse, and it turned out to be quite a pleasant sail back.

In general there was more good than bad, and it turned out to be quite an enjoyable trip.

Julian.

[sheila]

Glad you are back in the water again Julian. Great story.

[duncanhall]

Good to see you managed a sail you lucky ***.

Duncan

[sheila]

Duncan, saw your boat ashore over at Penarth! What's up?

[duncanhall]

New engine being fitted. Compression and injectors were shot on the old one. Hope to have it back early next week.