I cannot believe it is 5 days to go before the Summer Solstice on 21st of June… Midsummer’s Day for goodness sake. Here in Newlyn, Cornwall it is raining ( again ), misty, gloomy and very very windy. There is a strong wind warning out on the Met Office Inshore Waters forecast and having checked that against other forecasts…. SWIS, Theyr, Wind Guru, XC Weather and even the BBC coastal forecasts…. all indicate strong winds and rough conditions. This will be the second bad weather no sailing day in 3 weeks… so I shouldn’t moan! Or should I?

We have sailed the majority of the English South Coast ( except the Hastings to Dover bit ) and have not seen a single day of South Westerlies… ( the prevailing wind, the most common wind ) in the English Channel. Largely as a result of a blocking high pressure system that has kept the Atlantic depressions at bay. Good in one sense…. but instead of having to beat to windward constantly in the teeth of a SW blow…. for much of the time we have had no wind! So more motoring than actual sailing.

Storm Hector was the fore runner of a return of the south westerlies as the High Pressure cell moved away and allowed Atlantic type weather to come in. So now we have south westerlies a plenty… but they are blowing very forcibly…. above force 6 and the word ‘rough’ figures prominently in many forecasts.

So what do you do on a bad weather, no sailing day? Well you do jobs… catching up jobs. Only to be put off if friends and family turn up to visit.

The boat outside was washed down …. the crusty salt washed from the Oxford Blue topsides and from the coach roof and side decks. Special attention is given to the cockpit where most time is spent whilst sailing… and we eat there too… filled rolls, morale boosting finger dips into the famous Poli Poli ‘greedy box’ , endless cups of hot tea and coffee served in the ‘muggit’, crisps, tacos, and all manner of Cornish pasties and the likes… so the cockpit floor is a well trodden teak floor of crumbs and bits of food……disgusting!…. so we hose out the cockpit and wipe down all the mucky surfaces…. until looking like brand new.

Whilst working hard, we noticed sailing folk gathering with cameras at the ready … all looking the same way from the pontoon. A rather large head of a black seal had appeared and he or she was in the process of trying to bring a rather large silvery fish under control so that said seal could eat it. We were too late to catch the ‘red in tooth and claw’ moment with our i-phone cameras. The seal duly dived with his or her meal, not to be seen again. All this action happened about thirty meters from the boat.

A procession of sailors appeared to chat and say nice things about Southerly yachts in general and Poli Poli in particular. The evening before … the four gold bar epaulet man…namely the Captain Harbour Master even came to see us… and on viewing Poli Poli up close, he retorted ‘what a beast ‘ …. well I replied ‘she is not a beast… she is a princess’…the ex-RN Captain fell about guffawing in deep naval and nasal twang. He must of thought… got a real soppy one here.

So jobs filled the morning. Lunch was taken at the Tolcarne Inn…. recommended by Tom Cunliffe in his ‘The Shell Channel Pilot’….to quote him …’top class fish and beer’. We duly tested both. Excellent.

Newlyn?? Well to quote Tom Cunliffe again…’Newlyn is the most important fishing harbour in southern England and it is not set up for yachts.’ So we spied blood stains on the external walls and pavement of the Star/Ship pub…. which takes me back to Tom Cunliffe’s observations on Newlyn… ‘ the town has a reputation for hard-case fishing families running the show to their own unwritten laws’…..’but a yacht whose crew approach with due humility are usually accommodated overnight with good grace.’So we demonstrated due humility and kept a low profile.

The afternoon was taken up with family visitors from Exmouth in Devon. Carol and David arrived having been visiting a tin mine in a nearby location ( as one does! ). They arrived in their lovely blue camper van and parked outside the harbour master’s office. Don’t think Mister Four Bars on shoulders was in residence.

We had a good time chatting in the saloon of Poli Poli, drinking tea and coffee whilst Mike handed round the very expensive digestive biscuits. David is a senior member of the Exmouth RNIB…. and is a veritable encyclopedia of sailing knowledge… so we asked a lot of questions about our next port of call, ie Padstow. Carol proudly displayed her photos of the week they had recently spent on the Norfolk Broads on a wooden sailing boat that had no engine…. and no fenders! A lively and most enjoyable friendly afternoon. Carol and David left before the next lot of rain came in…. and spent the night in guess where…. Padstow!

Full marina facilities are not available at Newlyn. It is  fishing port which makes available a number of pontoons for visiting yachts. So if you wanted toilets and showers, you went up the hill in the winding back streets of Newlyn to a gym which seems to be in the attic of an old warehouse… which had long seen better days. And you paid two pounds fifty for the privilege. Newlyn is not Cowes or the Hamble River.

The bad weather, no sailing day ended chasing seagulls off the side decks…. and an opportunity for an early night.

A somewhat disturbed night on a mooring buoy in New Grimsby Sound, Tresco. The Sound… a long finger of water and in this case situated north to south… so if strong winds blew in from the north west…. and the Atlantic sends in its tides and swell…. then it is “roli roli”…. or as Mrs. H once put it … “like sleeping in a washing machine!”

So Friday morning at 3am arrived… the team got up and the boat was prepped for sea… some of the jobs had been done the night before… and at precisely 3.50am in a very dark morning… over an hour before dawn at 5.15am…. the line attaching Poli Poli to the mooring buoy was slipped and off we went.

The navigation lights had been switched on…. green and red on the bow, a white light on the stern and a white steaming light half way up the mast. I had also switched on the deck floodlight as Christine and Mike were going to stand at the bow “spotting” for me on the helm at the stern. In the strong NW winds it would be hard to hear what they might shout so we agreed a series of hand signals.

Moving very very slowly at 3 knots, and with great care in the darkness, Poli Poli moved snail like down a channel we had pre-planned… going due north…. along past a dozen moored vessels on the right ( most showing no lights ), various unused mooring buoys, lots of huge rocks, and fishing boats on the left. All done in the blackness of a moonless night.

As we moved north the channel, you could hear the Atlantic waves breaking on the rocks at the entrance at both sides. Mike was wearing a very powerful head torch and spotting expertly for me at the back of the boat, on the helm… right arm stretched out meaning “go right” and so on. His head torch would catch both the silhouette of the rocks and the white of the breaking waves. Both erie and awesome. The power of nature.

Increasing engine power to meet the oncoming Atlantic waves, Poli Poli surged forwards…climbing up and then over… then down  into the trough… then up again. Christine and Mike retreated to he safety of the cockpit. At 8 knots and 3,200 rpm we did well to overcome the breaking waves and swell… then power out northwards over the “overfalls” which are everywhere round the coast of the Scilly Isles.

Dawn broke and we had reached a point far enough northwards to slowly come round on the helm and head due east for the shipping lanes. Some of the Atlantic waves were huge…. passing at speed underneath our hull and rushing onwards to pound the Cornish coast.

We passed the Seven Stones lightship to the north, and once safely across both the down and up lanes of the shipping channel, we passed Wolf Rock lighthouse to the south. Far away from the Scilly Isles the wind was minimal …. barely 5 knots of true wind from the west. The mainsail had been raised but only to provide stability and as a visual target for other vessels.

Mike and Christine took turns off watch and we made good progress eastwards towards the Runnel Stone south cardinal bouy which marks the most southerly tip of the Lands End peninsula. At times we were averaging 7 knots… the pinkness of the easterly dawn had by now come and gone leaving a steely grey, gloomy landscape.

Poli Poli closed on the Cornish coast by 7.30am …. closer to our destination the big waves seem to disappear and the sea state moderated. As our VHF radio is always set on Channel 16 ( the emergency channel ) we overheard a fisherman calling for assistance from the Falmouth Coastguard …. he had rope around his propeller. He had being laying and checking his lobster pots. About 2o minutes later we watched the Penlee ILB ( out of Newlyn ) race along the base of the cliffs to his aid.  It is amazing that such a rescue is  funded by public contributions and carried out by volunteers who risk their lives on every call out. The RNLI is a truly amazing institution.

We approached the harbour entrance at Newlyn, having just passed the white Scillonian ferry ship… ( sometimes in rough weather known as the “vomit bucket” )… just before 9am…. 5 hours from Tresco… and moored up safely at the seaward end of the long pontoon. An uneventful and safe crossing from the Scilly Isles.

After “drawing breath” we walked ashore to the Harbourmaster’s Office at the far end of the fish dock and presented our credentials, paid our dues and asked the most important question of the day …. “which cafe in the town does the best full English breakfast?”

So to the Dukes Street Cafe we all marched and the Cornish Full English was thus sampled. Christine declined and had poached eggs on granary toast! What a wonderful cafe…. highly recommended opposite the car park in the centre of Newlyn.

On a previous visit to Newlyn in 2013, Rob, Josep and myself had visited the very same cafe and had taken “afternoon tea” there. The fresh Newlyn crab sandwiches were, in my opinion, the very best in texture, taste and sublime gourmet appreciation. Well done Dukes Street Cafe… you uphold the highest culinary standards. We will return again!

Christine departed the boat as her three weeks were up ( the longest she had ever spent living on a boat ! )… Christine  left at 1pm to catch her train back to the south east of England. Michael spent a couple of hours in Penzance laundry whilst T did jobs tidying up the boat. The lights went out in both the fore and aft cabin very early … about 8pm as we had been up in the very early hours. We were back on mainland Britain!

An ominous red line adorns most of the northern, north western, western and south western coastline warning of winds of over Force 6 strength … when there is a red line we don’t do sailing!

After a poor night of screaming banshees and Atlantic rollers rolling in down the New Grimsby Sound… we decided to stay put next door to the island of Tresco. Our plan was to sit out the effects of Storm Hector… and plan our return to the U.K. mainland on Friday when hopefully the weather might have calmed down.

By midday it was deemed to be calm enough for a dinghy ride ashore…. have a hot shower at the New Inn pub, partake in a light sandwich lunch, pay our mooring dues at the Island Office… and return unscathed by sea or wind. In fact by the afternoon it turned out to be a lovely day… sunny, blue skies, and a breeze. Christine tried her hand at helming the dinghy both to the slipway and back… successful on both occasions.

Photos above…. the slipway where we parked our dinghy on Tresco. Passage and tidal planning has taken place… the charts examined closely and route lines appended… if we want a fair tide we have to leave Tresco at 4am tomorrow morning to be in  Newlyn by 11am Friday . Nite Nite one and all.

After a welcome breakfast, we were visited by a young Adam in a big black rib… he knocked on the hull as he came alongside. He was the Tresco Harbour Master and collected £20 for a one night stay on a mooring buoy … cheerful and business like, he went on his way to the other boats in New Grimsby Sound.

Funny how many times the name Grimsby crops up in the Scilly Isles… not Liverpool, nor Chelsea or Manchester United… but League Two Grimsby Town… the Mariners!!! Hull City does not get a mention… but in the Scillies you find… a New Grimsby Sound, an Old Grimsby Sound, a New Grimsby Quay, an Old Grimsby Quay, the New Inn at New Grimsby and the Ruin Beach Cafe at old Grimsby…. and so on!

So ashore in the dinghy with Mike on the helm ( on the outboard motor ) … landed at the slipway, chained the dinghy and engine to a solid iron mooring ring… and went for coffee at the Bistro next to the Tresco Spa, shop, Post Office and Bike hire garage. No wet bums as the sea was calm and Mike expertly kept the breaking waves out of the boat. Very warm and sunny at this stage … to the point where sun cream had to be purchased from the island shop.

Tresco is a truly beautiful island … lying to the north of Saint Mary’s, and east of Bryher. So so neat and tidy, stunning gardens with radiant displays of flowers we don’t always see on the mainland… and so many buzzy bees populating brilliant yellows and pinks. Beaches of brilliant white, fine sand in great arcing bays… and so quiet and peaceful… you could certainly ‘chill out’ here as Mike put it. Tresco has the Abbey Gardens … world famous we are told…  sub-tropical plants plus a collection of ship’s figureheads.

We headed along the coastal path to the popular New Inn pub… today a pub visit would be different. The New Inn provided hot showers and clean fluffy white towels for the princely sum of £2.50…. mainly for sailors…. beautifully clean and well presented … including various flavours of shower gel and shampoo. The pub food is to be recommended too … for starters… crispy whitebait and chilli pork bites and for mains, mackerel fillets and salad, a big crab sandwich on whole meal and a coronation chicken sani on white bloomer.

So… only thing to do next was to walk off all that food! We set out climbing the hill behind the New Inn … everywhere beautifully neat and tidy, no litter, no graffiti, all hedgerows immaculate and precisely trimmed.. was difficult to spot weeds in flower and shrub beds. Big multi coloured dustbins outside houses presented a puzzle… there were none to be seen. On the mainland we have become so used to seeing lots of huge waste bins of all colours literally littering our roads, streets avenues and cul de sacs. The street landscape has been changed forever… but not on Tresco. Every dustbin is housed in a small, unobtrusive wooden shelter where you have to open a slatted door to your rubbish in.

We walked up and over the spne of the island to St Nicholas’ Church… a beautiful building set in verdant green countryside … with a real dairy herd in the background. Mike discovered a family who had lost five sons in the Second World War… two sailors were also buried in the church graveyard.  From the church we wandered slowly Back to the sea on the east side of the island… to Old Grimsby Quay.. built seawards from a serene and pure white sandy crescent of a beach.

Mike and toby taking afternoon tea at Old Grimsby sound, the ruin Cafe,

Looking out over East Tresco … the Old Grimsby sound.

At the fair end, we took tea and a coffee as refreshment and fed the resident robin on scraps from our shortbread. This cafe was known as the Ruin Beach Cafe… beautifully laid out along the seafront in gardens of a more southerly latitude. Our exercise after lunch, ended with a hill climb nearly up to the Old Blockhouse ( of World War Two vintage ) and then inland past the lake, woods and in the distance Trescorning  Abbey, before returning to the slipway where we had left our dinghy and outboard engine all chained up to an old rusty mooring ring. Back to Poli Poli … our day ended with some serious discussion as to the pretty dreadful inshore waters forecast for the morrow… Storm Hector had arrived.

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Woke up this morning at just gone 5 am … dawn breaking… noticed that the wind turbine had stopped turning and there was no slapping of waves behind my head in the aft cabin… so ? No wind and very calm. What to do? Another day moored off Hugh Town on St. Mary’s ?? Glanced at the tidal clock on the forward bulk head ( given to me by 1679 Squadron Erith School Squadron for being their President for nearly 21 years… a jolly fine and useful retirement gift … much appreciated on the high seas )… the tidal clock indicated 1 hour after high water in St. Mary’s.

We had planned to sail the 9 n.miles around the Scilly Isles this morning… taking two hours or so… to find a new mooring in New Grimsby Sound off the beautiful island of Tresco. I reasoned that if we left immediately with this calm weather and 5 hours of high tide… we could do the short cut straight out of Hugh Town then north through the gap between Bryher and Tresco… about 2 n.miles instead of the planned 9. A risky route for the uninitiated but I had done it once before coming the other way from Tresco southwards to Hugh Town.

We did it in 50 minutes. The team responded brilliantly and we were ready to sail in 30 minutes and let go the big yellow mooring buoy and headed north across Saint Mary’s Road ( not a road as such, a waterway )…. however a big, white German cruise ship appeared in front of us, but stopping to take on board a pilot, we managed to navigate round her ( for the uninitiated all boats and ships are “she’s “)…

At the press of a button our one ton cast iron keel was raised as we navigated the shallow waters where the depth went down from 5m to 1.8m …. our draft with keel up is 0.8m .. so we very gingerly and with great care, worked our way through the gap. The waters around the Scilly Isles are beautifully clear… you could see the weedy, sandy bottom.. beautiful in an aesthetic sense… but a bit scary if you are trying to move a 15 ton yacht through the shallows.

After 50 minutes we had arrived at New Grimsby Sound. Mike phoned the Harbour master before we reached our destination and he informed us that there was a vacant mooring bouy. Christine and Mike on the foredeck… working expertly with the “handy duck”… tethered Poli Poli to a big orange mooring buoy. Pleased to be in a beautiful spot… and then the sun came out! Breakfast time… we had arrived at 8.20am.

New Grimsby Sound viewed from West Tresco, Poli Poli is moored just off top centre… closer to the island of Bryher. We had to use our dinghy to come ashore.

After tying Poli Poli up to a big green mooring buoy in the bay opposite Hugh Town, the capital of the Scilly Isles.. we had a light lunch of Cornish pasties and salad. Eager to get ashore, we made ready the inflatable dinghy known as Mister Zodiac and managed to get the big outboard engine off the guard rail and down onto the back of the dinghy.

The wind was blowing hard by now…a northerly… and the team of three set off for the dinghy park on the Hugh Town harbour wall. Three of us in the dinghy reduced the freeboard considerably and it was not long before wavelets and spray came over the side…so wet bums all round.

Horrible feeling wet trousers and underpants, walking around the shops in Hugh Town through considerable crowds of tourists who had just alighted from their day trips to different islands in the Scillies group. We had to stand in the wind and sun to “air dry” our bottoms.

Photo above….air drying our wet bums Hugh Town Bay, St. Mary’s. Lesson learnt. Later a nice meal was had at the Atlantic pub on the waterfront. Then blow me down, the wind had increased in strength by the time we left the pub…so guess what…wet bums a second time round! Serious salty spray over the top and in our faces on the way back to Poli Poli.

Monday morning…up at just gone 5am as a misty dawn appeared over Land’s End. It had rained hard in the night…all of us scrambling around at 2.30am to shut the hatches… as it had been warm and humid the night before.

We departed Newlyn, a busy working fishing harbour, at 6.25am. Once through the stone entrance wham bang…Mike and Christine did not notice at first as they were collecting in the mooring ropes and fenders…but wham bang in your face…at anchor, not 2 miles away… the brand new RN aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth II ….with at least six smaller boats armed to the teeth, buzzing about in the water around her. What a truly amazing sight…she is enormous!

No wind to start with, but just off Land’s End we encountered a northerly of 10 knots and above…so from the Runnel Stone south cardinal buoy  marking Lands End, we sailed all the way across this part of the Atlantic Ocean to the Spanish Ledges at the gap between Saint Mary’s and Saint Agnes in the Scilly Isles…a distance of 40.2 nautical miles … the longest uninterrupted sail of the voyage so far…in 6 hours exactly. We bombed along on a beam to broad reach at an average speed of 7.8 knots…wonderful and exhilarating…Poli Poli purred along, her bow wave her smile as she cleaved a path westwards away from the English coast. She roared past the Wolf Rock lighthouse and sped across the southerly entrances of the two traffic separation lanes ( a dual carriageway for big ships to stop them colliding with each other! ).

The sun shone all the way…and we reached the Spanish Ledges and Bartholomew buoys at about noon. Sails down, motor on, and Mike and Christine, with the “duck” in hand plus mooring lines…we moored onto a big green mooring buoy in Hugh Town bay, the capital of St. Mary’s . We had reached the Scilly Isles.

The no wind beast had been slain …no more recitals of the Ancient Mariner …of the dead albatross and wallowing in the doldrums. We had sailed…at last. Samual Taylor Coleridge’s story is a magnificent tale… but not for us.

We are moored up in the Pendennis Marina in Falmouth. I spent Saturday evening updating this blog as to what we got up to on our rest day…. however it seems to have got lost in the ether of the internet and was never published. Never mind… with the great world web going wrong, the best therapy is to throw the device to the four winds…. then calm down and start again. So here goes…

A Saturday is usually laundry day…. and Mike, Christine and I spent much of Saturday occupying the two washing machines and two dryers of Pendennis Marina…. nobody else got a look in.  The previous Saturday… at Portland Marina on a rest day, I had walked over 10,000 steps getting my washing done over about 10 hours. The Portland laundry room is adorned with many threats of keel hauling ( which if you know what it is, is very very unpleasant… a horrific and cruel punishment awarded to sailors of bygone days who crossed their Captain ). In Portland you get “keel hauled” if you abuse the machines… well you might feel like abusing the Portland machines… as there are no instructions as to how to use them… one machine is actually paid for with old one pound coins… but it doesn’t say that.

Pendennis laundry actually had instructions…. but oh so so long in terms of waiting time…. and the driers whilst working, did not dry efficiently… so much so that on arrival in Newlyn at Lands End, Mike and Christine had to walk to Penzance with a big heavy bag of damp Falmouth laundry…. to dry in a local laundrette. One bonus was… they got to go to the pub!

Any way….. enough of washing dirty sailing clothes. On this rest day Poli Poli had honoured visitors from way back in the past….Liz and Brian Terry… retired teachers from a bygone age… I taught with Liz in the very strange Northamptonshire town of Corby… a unique Scottish enclave set in the country side with an umbilical chord of a weekend coach linking it to Glasgow and back. Toilet graffiti was more about the Pope and the Red Hand of Ulster.

I had last met Liz and Brian in the early 1990’s when Liz was Head of a school in Brigg, Lincolnshire and Brian a senior teacher in the city of Hull.

Anyway Liz and Brian spent some time looking over Poli Poli, a jolly decent Spanish lunch was had…. washed down with Cornish lager, a walk through the high street of Falmouth ( M & S being closed down )…. and a long sit down on the pier watching the local youngsters diving and swimming below us… kids now swim in wet suits these days. It was a “cossie” in my day!

Meanwhile Mike and Christine… also did the walk with additional visits to the laundry room in between… and an afternoon visit to the National Maritime Museum in Pendennis, Falmouth. Here they viewed a special exhibition on the theme of the Titanic disaster in 1912.

Come 6pm the day was done and we retired to the boat… it had been a lovely day weather wise… the second best in 13 days along the south coast of England… the other being the rest day in Dartmouth. It was scorther Saturday… high preesure still dictating relatively calm and settled conditions. There was wind in the morning but by pm we were back to the doldrums type conditions… flat calm and a glassy sea.

After writing out a passage plan for Falmouth to Penzance, we retired to bed at 10.30pm… rest day over. The plan was to depart at 8am the next morning…. so a not too early start to sail the 35 or so nautical miles round the famous Lizard to Penzance.

Day dawned in Falmouth at 10 past 5, a brilliant sunrise in the east, shades of blue slowly expanding with the light, warm and oh so so still…. not a breath of wind ! Yet another windless morning… our new wind turbine generator sadly both silent and still.

We are about to complete our sailing of the major part of the south coast of England… from Eastbourne westwards to Penzance in Cornwall … next to Lands End for goodness sake… and over the past two weeks since starting, the theme has been glassy, oily seas and very, very little wind. Today was a continuation of that theme.

Prior to departure at 8.15am…. showers and breakfast was had early, rubbish was taken to the bins, milk was purchased from a 6am opening Tesco Express and the boat was made ready for sea in an orderly and routine manner.

We sailed out of Falmouth Harbour past the Royal Navy supply ships, two super motor yachts… into the Carrick Roads of the River Fal. Sailing in this sense means “motoring” with the main sail up!! Like days before, the forecast winds of force 3 and 4 never appeared. The sea was a surreal oily sheen with no ripples or ruffles to disturb the surface.

This part of the British coast is punctuated by fine, outstanding headlands. We have Beachy Head in Sussex but Cornwall has the lions share of iconic headlands. So we past Saint Anthony Head, the Manacles, Black Head, and of course the most famous of all…. the Lizard…. a very very impressive view and lighthouse… at the point when Christine, in the cockpit, had her hand in the Greedy Box.

Over the course of a couple of hours, we both avoided the deadly rocks of the Boa, and crossed the width of Mounts Bay from east to west making good time. St. Michael’s Mount was observed close up on the starboard bow.

After a phone conversation with the Harbour Master of Penzance… we agreed to change our plans and head for the major Cornish fishing port of Newlyn. The mooring we had planned in Penzance was to be inside the “wet dock” but we were told that if we needed to leave the next day it would have to be 4am in the morning or way past 2pm in the afternoon.

We did not fancy a 4am departure for the Scilly Isles and 2pm was  far  too late… so we just went next door, to a pontoon at Newlyn where we could depart for St. Mary’s on the morrow at a time that suited us. So here we are right next door to Land’s End… our jumping off point into the Atlantic Ocean tomorrow. Scilly Isles here we come.