Covid Tests & Truro, Visitors, 'Whoops' and Sweepstake Results (Falmouth 25-27th August)

The above is a photo of the interior of Truro Cathedral. I was surprised to learn it's actually quite recent; built in 1875 or thereabouts when the then new Diocese of Truro was created.

The main reason for being in Truro was to get our 'Day 2' Covid tests. It took ages to find somewhere nearby and Truro was the nearest - half an hour on the train. Even given the rip off price of £129 per head we were pleased to have to make the trip into Truro which is an atttractive town. 

After getting our tests and wandering around we headed off for a walk down the North bank of the Truro River with Malpas being our destination where a local has told us we would find a lovely pub with a view over the river.....

"Now then, what time's high tide? Come to that, where have I gone?"

We did find the lovely pub by the River but unfortunately, we couldn't get in because of ... Covid of course. So we turned round and headed back to Truro town. Fortunately, we found another pub within 45 minutes and so were able to quench our thirsts and fill our tummies. I also phoned my Stepmum and Mum.

The photos of Bonny on the Pontoon at Falmouth with her name prominently displayed on the cockpit dodgers, promted Mum to recount her wartime evacuation experience of farm life including a Carthorse named "Bonny", on which, if she was very good, she was able to ride. That sealed my decision on whether to re-name Bonny or not. "Bonny" will now, most definitely, remain "Bonny".

On our return to Falmouth, we took Agustin for a traditional Cornish treat, a cream tea. Unfortunately, neither tea or cream were to his taste. 

I'm not sure what happened on Thursday other than we did the laundry and cleaned up the boat. Oh yes, and in the afternoon we had OCC visitors. Reg and Nicky on their Rustler 42, who Agustin has met before in Gran Canaria, and John on his Rival 32. I met John when sailing Arctic Smoke on the Jester Baltimore Challenge in 2019. 

Ah, I nearly forgot the "Whoops". As John was leaving he said, "...Oh I see you've taken your hydrovane rudder off" I replied "... no I haven't". "Yes you have" he retorted. "No I haven't I said with equal conviction". "Yes you have"....  "No I haven't, look it's just.... ****ing hell it's gone". The dam thing had dropped off somewhere during the last 50 miles of the passage. We thought it wasn't working too well🤣. Another job to add to the already lengthy list.

On the Friday we went for a morning walk to Pendennis Castle on the Western shore of the harbour entrance....

In the afternoon, Ian and Venessa visited from Barnstaple. Ian's an old Sailing pal and provided us with weather reports via text messages over satalite....

That night we opened the sealed envelope with our predictions in it for the lengthof the passage. My guess that we would cross a line at an angle of 315° through the Lizard Light, at 1600 on 24th of August was the closest. The guys subsequently nought me a bottle of bubbly!

Saturday is the start of a series of Ocean Cruising Club events and Sharon, Stephen, Ines and Amara are driving down to spend the weekend with us.

Arrived Falmouth

We moored up at 0710 this morning, Tuesday, 24/8. 

Celebrations yes, but also countering exasperation at the awful bureaucracy we now have to wade through thanks to Brexit and Covid. The official government process does not for yachts that have spent more than 10 days at sea and so the officials have to advise us to lie on the form! Day 2 Covid test took an age to find and will cost us £129 each.

The Shipping Forecast at 1755 yesterday indicated the possibility of Force 6 North East winds today. That would have been dead on the nose and rather uncomfortable, so at 1820, with 27 miles 5-6 hours) to the Lizard, we turned the engine back on and headed directly for the headland, in the hope that we can make port before the F6 arrives!

We did obviously. However, our new neighbours confirmed that the wind did indeed get up and they had to vacate their anchorage in Helford because it was to rough!

Last Day at Sea? "No" 🤣 (day/night at sea 12 to dawn on 24/8)

This looked like our last dawn and day at sea. At the time of writing (1000 ish on 23/10, we are 47 miles from the Lizard under power at 3 knots (we have a foul tide). Unfortunately, we are having to dodge a number of fishing vessels which means we cannot head directly for the Lizard.

Ha, ha, how quickly things change! As at 1100 it became apparent that we would not get in tonight! We now have a nice breeze (albeit from where we are headed) and the sun is out and Dolphins are playing around the boat so we are sailing once again, heading roughly East. If this breeze continues we will tack North later today.

Further good news is that a liberal application of WD40 to the moving parts of the hydrovane has restored its health and 'Red' is once again at the helm!

In coming friendlies at 3, 6, & 9 o'clock; where has all the power gone?.... (Day/Night 11 at sea to Dawn 22/8)

A truly wonderful experience this morning. We were accompanied for a couple of hours by a large pod - multiple scores of- these beautiful creatures, which, I think, are Pilot Whales. Fortunately, they travel at a more sedate pace than their Dolphin cousins and so it was possible to get some half decent pictures...

Despite their more restrained manners, they were just as inquisitive as Dolphins. Many times, groups of them were almost rubbing against the boat rather like a cat rubs against your leg when asking for food. The biggest ones were about 4 meters long. I spotted at least one baby amongst them, who, under supervision, came right alongside, only inches from the boat. He, or she, was about a 1.5 metres long. They were jet black, as can be seen, with sizeable dorsal fins and large rounded heads.

It's nearly 1700 BST, the sun is out and we are running directly for the Lizard, 190 miles off at 5+ knots. This morning, progress was very slow at a measly 1.5-3 knots, but we finally broke through into slightly fresher winds at around midday and at about 1500 put in the course change from our previous Northerly heading on which we had been in pursuit of more wind. 

Given the forecast (we are now able to pick up the shipping forecast on LW - the Navtex, our only other on-board source of weather info, with a range of about 270 miles, sadly seems to have expired) is for these winds to hold over the next day or so; it therefore doesn't seem too unreasonable to expect tha we'll be in Falmouth sometime on Monday.

This afternoon I re-organised the mainsail preventer system (the rope that goes forward from the end of the boom to a block (pulley) forward and then back to the cockpit. It's used to stop the boom from uncontrollably slamming from one side of the boat to the other when changing direction with the wind behind (gybing), so that it blows from the other side of the boat 

A stanchion (the short upright poles you can see in the photos above) had got bent through careless use of the preventer (my fault). I therefore moved the block forward and whilst I was at it added a second preventer attached to the boom at the same place but rigged on the other side of the boat so that once the gybe has been completed we can just tighten that rather than having to move the single preventer acrosd the boat. 

Once I had done that, I realised that all moving the blocks would achieve  - unless the preventer was fully slackened before the gybe - would be to put the strain on a different stanchion!

Still, at least I had hopefully, made it a little easier to manage the gybing process.

I then tried to straighten the bent stanchion. I couldn't, it was too strong - that repair will require heat to soften the stainless steel. However, in the process of trying, the eye at the end of the guard rail wire, got stuck in the plastic anti- chafe tube through which it ran (see last but one photo above). I tried for two hours unsuccessfully to get it out. Finally, I followed Agustin's suggestion to pull it right out, attach a line to it, apply some grease and then pull it back through the tube. It worked! 

Three hours after starting the job to straighten the the stanchion, things were no better, but now at least no worse, than when I started! 

My turn to cook. The last of the beef burgers were still fine despite turning off the fridge the previous night and so they were delivered along with braised red cabbage (still fine) and oven chips. Desert, was the last sweet pineapple (one had to be consigned to the deep).

The wind got up just before I went off watch and so with the possibility of more to come (up to Force 6) we put 2 reefs in. That slowed us down more than I expected from 6+ knots to around 4 knots. I had a sneaking suspicion that someone was playing tricks and turned the fan down as soon as we had reefed but I was too lazy ro stay up and monitor the situation and so went ro bed. I woke a number of times and each time it felt like we were only making 3 or so knots and sometimes the rolling was as a consequence, severe. 

At 0400 when i took over from Agustin it was clear that we were indeed down to crawling speed once again and so I shook out the two reefs in the mainsail. That improved matters a little, taking us back up to around 4.5 knots. 

But by dawn, that was back down to around 3 knots. Now, what was that about arriving on Monday!?

The swell was still dominating the wind and so we continued to rock and roll and slap and crash. 

Power continues to be a problem. Despite a good day yesterday for both sun and wind which got the domestic batteries back up to 12.9 volts, by the evening they were back down to 12.2. It's beginning to look as if they will need replacing. 

The mystery as to why the engine/alternator is not charging the domestic batteries continues and will probably require the equivalent of open heart surgery on the boat's electrical system, which given our proximity to Falmouth - now (0530)  will be put off until then. Unfortunately, we didn't think to check that aspect of the charging system when we replaced the engine battery in Funchal.

This feels all to familiar...(day/night 12 at sea to dawn on 23/8)

Surprise, surprise with only 116 nautical miles to go to the Lizard, in the extremities of the 'Western Approaches', it's wet and foggy. The wind has dropped further and we are now under power making about 4.5 knots. Even for me, there is little attraction to sitting around in the damp fog waiting for wind when burning some deisel will should get us in to Falmouth within 36 hours.

We have made some progress on understanding the mysteries of the boat's charging system. The alternator is charging the domestic batteries but it appears that is refusing to increase their voltage beyond we 12.4 with no load and that the Fridge is consuming more power than the Alternator is delivering. Quite why will require further investigation.

We hope we have now found where the power is going and why the alternator is not charging the domestic batteries properly.... There are three domestic batteries connected in parallel and so act as one big battery la; two of them are identical and were probably installed fairly recently at the same time. The third is a different make and looks older. To test the possibility that it is draining power from the other two, we disconnected it and measured its voltage and compared it with that of the other two. We got 12.4 v 12.6. Agustin thought that was enough to drain power from the other two. We therefore left it disconnected and monitored the voltage on the other two. It went up to 13.1 within the hour - a reading we had not seen for several days. However, with declining sunlight the volt levels dropped during the day until at around 1900 the reading was 12.1. At that point we switched the engine on to charge the batteries. Initially the voltage read 12.7 but then dropped to 12.3! So the mystery remains!

Despite the wet foggy start to the day the afternoon has been bright with just enough breeze to keep us sailing (since 1330)...

We have also been visited twice by Dolphins today and I managed to get one passable photo of a couple...

Excitement is now mounting amongst the crew because, barring very unfortunate events, we should pass the Lizard tomorrow afternoon/evening and indeed make Falmouth a few hours later. The Lizard is THE landfall reference for all vessels entering The English Channel, but it has additional significance for the crew of the good ship Bonny. A vast fortune is at stake in the shape of our sweepstake predictions of the date and time we transit the line running North West/South East through the Lizard Lighthouse. The crew's secret predictions are in a sealed in an envelope in the chart table. He, whose prediction is nearest to our actual transit will win his fortune - well a bottle of something up to the value of £25 anyway! None of us know what the others have predicted. We will mark/record our crossing of the transit when we pass it and open the envelope once we have moored up and have our celebratory drinks!

I noticed another problem after dinner. On checking the exhaust (we were running the engine to chare the batteries).  I noticed there was no water coming out. Luckily, with two very mechanical minded crew (Agustin is an Airplane Engineer) we had an abundance of skills and experience to address the problem. First the water filter on the engine inlet was checked and cleaned and secondly the water pump impeller was checked. It turned out to be shredded! The guys replaced it with a spare and all is now well.

It's now nearly 0500 there are 60 miles to go to the Lizard and we are under power. The engine went on during the previous Watch due to lack of wind. I had hoped we would be able to sail the remainder of the way but even I can't really face going at 1 knot or less when we are so close to making Port and we have the option of the engine.

After the Blow (10th Day/Night at sea until dawn 21/8)

Sunrise on Saturday 21st August at 0648 BST

Agustin took over at 0700 and no sooner had he got out on deck than the wind stopped. Dead. Completely. Utterly. One minute we were creaming along at 7 knots the next we were being tossed like a cork, on a large and chaotic swell, going nowhere except possibly backwards. It was as if a switch had been thrown and the fan turned off 

The barometer had dropped 10 millibars in the 24 hours prior to the blow, but had remained steady since at 1021 (probably reading 10millibars too high given weather reports) and indeed at the time of writing - 1500 on 21/8) is still there. I now wonder if we had sailed right into the middle of a low. The conditions preceding the 'switch off' seemed to tally pretty with that scenario.

What little wind followed, was from the South West and to make any progress at all, we would need to shake out the reefs and rig the pole so that we could goosewing the genoa. I wasn't looking forward to the prospect with the boat rolling and pitching violently, but if we were to make any progress at all, it had to be done. 

Agustin and I set too and left Mick to his well earned rest in 'Bonny the washing machine'. He had already complained that the rinse cycle was stuck on 'On' with large quantities of the Atlantic Ocean finding its way through the poorly fitting forehatch onto his bed! (In return for a small surcharge, I therefore temporarily relocated him to my bunk - the pilot berth).

First job was to furl the currently useless and flogging genoa and to then shake out the reefs in the main. That all went as smoothly as possible given the conditions. Next - rig the pole. Things rather went downhill from this point. It didn't help that one second the foredeck was on top of a mini mountain and the next it was burried in a trough with heavy water streaming across it, but I can't blame the ensuing fiasco entirely on the conditions. Simple stupidity was the main cause. I managed to run both guys (the ropes that attach to the end of the pole) through the wrong way AND through the wrong leads on multiple occasions. Poor Agustin must have wondered what sort of idiot he had hitched a ride with! Could an OCC qualifying passage really be worth putting up with this clown 🤡! 

Finally, after half a dozen attempts I got it right and I heeved all three or so metres of the wildly swinging pole into position without knocking myself out. Then it was a simple matter to set the Genoa and we were off - at the giddy pace of 1 to 2 knots - with the sails flapping and slamming with every roll (about every second). But at least we were now moving and in roughly the right direction.

The one remaining problem was steering the boat. The combination of very light winds and sunstantial and confused swell was just too much for the Hydrovane and so I steered by hand for the next couple of hours before handing over to Mick. I suggested he could make use of the autohelm if he preferred.

When I re-emerged a few hours later, the sky had cleared and it was sufficiently pleasant to hang our wet gear out to dry (not that clothing soaked in salt water will ever dry). The wind had not changed though, we were still creeping along at 1-2 knots. Somewhat tantalisingly, the Lizard was now (at 1645 BST), only 261 nautical miles off, or at this speed, a mere four and a half days😂!

Time for lunch! Mick was still asleep and so Agustin and I started without him...

He soon surfaced however and over sandwiches, we all marvelled at the strange weather of the previous night.

What next? We should be able to pick up the BBC shipping forecast on Long Wave at 1755. Hopefully, that will give grounds for optimism!

Well, according to the forecast we should have a South Westerly wind of force 3-5. We still have aboutfor force 1-2, barely enough to give us stearage way and not enough for the Hydrovane to operate [It may well now need stripping down and a full service. It's not as responsive as it was and I spotted one component that is damaged and needs replacing. 

With the Hydrovane out of action we either have to hand steer or use the Autohelm. The latter uses electricity and our domestic batteries are running low due to lack of sun and wind. We are therefore running the engine for a while to give them a boost. However, that's not working for some reason which we have yet to ascertain, so we now need to economise on our use of electricity! Everything not absolutely necessary was turned off and first to go was the fridge. We may have to throw our last packet of beef burgers away!

Overnight the wind died further and so at 0140 with a about 280 miles to go to the Lizard we resorted to the engine. However, by the time I was back on Watch at 0400 the breeze had returned with sufficient strength to sail once more.  Both the mainsail and the pole were set to starboard now and so I stowed the pole and prepared the guys for its use on the port side should it be needed there and then set sail and turned the engine off. We are now (0700) heading for the Lizard at 4 knots with 218 miles to go! 

'Visitors'; and a 'bit of a Blow' (9th Day/Night at sea, to dawn on 20/8)

The above is, I'm afraid, the only image I managed to capture of, possibly, hundreds of dolphins that came to say "hello" to us this afternoon. They kept our company for almost an hour and performed their usual dare-devil stunts around the bow of the boat. I even saw a calf join in - it kept up with its adult minder with apparent ease - as they both darted backwards and forwards across the bow. They all sliced theough the water at speed without appearing to make the slightest effort and it seemed like they were all simply showing off and having fun.

Further away others occasionally leapt clean out of the water as they raced towards us. They came from multiple directions at the same time and so it appeared that we had sailed into a very large social gathering. Then, off in a couple of different directions I could see the surface foaming with numerous dolphins churning up the sea. In one of the closer disturbances I saw fish jumping out of the water and at least one sea bird make off with a prize! The dolphins were clearly hunting and presumably it was this, that has brought them together in such large numbers. 

Earlier, on completing my Watch at 0700, I returned to my bunk for more sleep. I normally do for a couple of hours, but this time having slept so badly during the night, I stayed in bed until my next Watch at midday!

Around 1700 we decided we could head directly for The Lizard without an excessive risk of ending up in the clutches of the high pressure zone (no wind) lurking in the Bay of Biscay. This required dispensing with the pole used to gooswing the genoa and then gybing the boat.

A little earlier we had received a message from Ian warning us of 25k winds forecast for our area in the morning. Nothing to worry about especially as they will be from the south but we will put a reef in before dark in preparation.

Well we did put a reef in and then another and the another! By MIDNIGHT the wind was whistling through the rigging, the mainsail waa reefed right down and nearly half the genoa was furled and we were hurtling through near zero visability in driving rain at 7 knots. It took some time to set up the sails and vane so that the boat would steer herself but eventually by around 0200 we got things sorted. 

Agustin and I and then just me, took the first Watch and Mick took over around 0500. At the end of his Watch at 0700, he reported that the wind may be moderating and that he had just experienced the heaviest rain ever at sea! Agustin said that from his berth on the quarter, it sounded like a road drill being used on deck!  I must have slept through it all because I didn't hear a thing.

TBC...