Cruise to Bull Bay and back

Mark Rosenthal

After a night onboard at FlairIV’s Holyhead Mooring I woke to some rain so my plans to do some work on the external parts of the boat were impractical. I therefore concentrated on cleaning internal areas like the heads and the galley. By 09:00 the rain had stopped and this allowed me to raise the mainsail to re-stick a patch just below the 23rd batten. Tess arrived shortly after and started helping with the preparations for training for flying the spinnaker. Sean made it well before the deadline and we managed to set off just after 10-15 catching the flood tide up to and beyond Carmel Head. Having been through the setup for flying the spinnaker we kept it under wraps until we had rounded Carmel Head and sailed into the calmer waters on the approach to the Furlong mark. The launch of the kite went well except for the velcro on the bag still holding some of the sail in, once corrected it all worked nicely with the crew experiencing controlling the main aspects of the symmetrical spinnaker; the pole angle on the guy, the pole downhaul, the sheet and the two lazy contro lines. The winds being westerly and the tide at full flow our apparent wind was around 5 - 6kt but with the kite up we were making over 10kt SOG. Perfect conditions for this training session. Next came a practice on Gybing the spinnaker, this went surprisingly well considering the two crew had never really been part of the foredeck group! After passing through between Middle Mouse and the main coast of Anglesey the winds were increasing and as we approached our planned destination of Bull Bay we saw gusts of 17kt. Rounding into the bay we had an issue with releasing the guy from the pole which then meant that we had to release the guy and the sheet from the deck controls before we could de-power the sail. With limited room and the now strong winds dumping over the cliffs it was a bit of a game to recover the spinnaker especially when the port sheet got wrapped round the prop shaft. Once successfully at anchor in around 12m Tess volunteered to dive to review the problem. She reported a big knot of rope around the prop but with a number of free dives she managed to release it in its entirety, a fantastic achievement! After drying off and a warm brew we had lunch to recover before lifting the anchor and sailing back up wind to Carmel Head from where we sailed on a reach to the end of the breakwater and on to our mooring. A grand sail with lots of useful experience! Well done crew.