2 months without toast

Our previous boat had a grill.  As we normally have a high-toast-content diet, we miss this, so for lunch today we went straight for the toast (scrambled egg option) at a local café in Bangor.  Little things.  We have spent a pleasant few days here awaiting our new crew member.  (Would have been a shorter wait if he hadn’t missed his flight to Belfast, but then we wouldn’t have found the scrambled egg and toast.)  The local council has worked hard to create a Bangor walking tour with limited historical and cultural material at its disposal.  Highlights were an Edward VIII post box (which isn’t actually a post box as far as we can see), Bangor castle museum (fairly recent but nevertheless in an impressive setting) and, the reason we came here in the first place, the Pickie Fun Park Mini Golf.  Alex won this major sporting event by 3 strokes.

On the way to Bangor we spent a couple of days in Strangford Lough, a pretty place with an “interesting” entry: several miles long with tidal flows as high as our maximum speed and narrow enough to need frequent tacking when the wind is against you.  (It was.) Near one end there’s a huge tower to support the tidal barrage.  It looks benign enough at slack water but at full flow (as it was when we came in) there is a huge wave piled up against it on one side with a corresponding hole in the water on the other and a big slope in between.  The whole thing is painted black and red (colours of the isolated danger mark) and you would think it should be easy enough to miss, but it comes at you very quickly when you are tacking in a 6 knot stream with 25-30 knots of wind!

Winch components after cleaning in petrol

Easy enough to avoid in benign conditions

Approach to Portaferry

We had a decent sail up here from Strangford and have seen many more cruising yachts than in the previous 3 weeks in the Republic of Ireland.  Some of them were even sailing.  As we try to avoid using the engine we are always amazed at the number of people motoring about in sailing yachts, in conditions that seem perfectly good for sailing.  However, the engine is certainly useful from time to time.  The last few miles to Bangor from our overnight anchorage off Copeland Island had taken quite a while before Helen relented (under pressure) and agreed we needed to motor if we wanted to arrive the same day.  Pros and cons though.  While drifting about aimlessly on the tide we had a small bottlenose dolphin circle the boat a couple of times, coming close enough for us to hear it breathing when it crested the surface.  Don’t think we’d have seen that with the motor on…

On windless days we have been ticking some odd jobs off our list: took one of the halyard winches apart as it has been making strange groaning noises and found a plastic washer in pieces in the bottom.  Have replaced with a copper one and will see if that is good enough.  Traced our mystery 0.5A current drain to a combination of the CO alarm and the stereo and have now wired them in properly to the circuit breakers and switch panel so they can be switched off when not in use.  Finally, we wired in a new pump for the fuel cell waste container so we can clear it without having to empty the cockpit locker!