cruise 6 Day 2

Mark Rosenthal

Day 2 After a very still night at anchor in Bangor Bay the crew seemed to have had a good night’s sleep and we were almost ready to up anchor at 08:00 but a slight glitch in the anchor locker meant a short delay; the anchor rope had got caught in the chain and stuck in the windlasst drive wheel. Flair’s new windlass worked well and my great uncle, Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor’s design, the CQR anchor, which had held us well, lifted as per the design spec with the windlass clutch tightened for the final lift from the sea bed. Once freed we set off with a quickly infilling wind sailing with the main and the code 0 with the SE wind at 8 to 10kn. A really encouraging start to the day. Flair made good progress across the entrance to Belfast Lough avoiding the odd ferry or two. As we rounded the end of the Lough and turned to port our apparent wind angle went beyond the useful point for the code 0 and the floater spinnaker was deployed in the reducing winds. By 11:15 we had to give up on the spinnaker too and resorted to motor sailing, this remained the case for the majority of the day. In the morning the passage plan route was given to Savvy Navvy to verify with the tides and timings this route was then exported as a gpx file and transferred to the B&G chart plotter. All good and off we set with the intention of being at Rathlin Sound by the time the tidal streams would be in our favour.