A weekend away

 We belong to a facebook sailing group called Sailing Cruising Scotland. This weekend they had a Rally planned at Holy Loch Marina. As this is only 10nm from Robinetta's mooring we decided to go. The forecast was for very light winds, so potentially we would be motoring the whole way, which was not a problem with this length of trip.

Unusually our son Alex decided he would like to come too, so there were three aboard Worm when I rowed us out to Robinetta mid-morning on Saturday. The sea was totally flat (a bit of a difference from my last row out)which was just as well as we did not have much freeboard!

We were at mid flood tide, springs, as we came off the mooring, with not a hope of getting through the Rhu Narrows under sail with the wind we had. Once we were through the Narrows we did try sailing for 15 minutes, but at about 0.7knots we would miss the barbeque, so the engine went back on until we were passing Kilcreggan, with a little more wind. An hour later we had still not reached Cove, so the engine went on for 15 minutes, at which point we finally found a good wind and began sailing properly.

By 14.45 we were just off Holy Loch Marina, and put the engine on to take down the sails.

Most of the Rally boats moored up on the breakwater pontoon. We chose to go on the outside of the breakwater where we would be blown off. There was plenty of room since most of the boats had gone inside to be away from any waves. It was so calm that this was not problem for us. Once settled in we headed for the "cocktail bar" manned by the Cutters and Sloops group before moving on to the Holy Loch Sailing Club for the barbeque. 

The weather was perfect for the event, with bright warm sunshine. Even the midges were kind to us and stayed away! Alex got a little sunburnt as he is not used to being outside as much.

Sunday's sail home was pretty much a repeat of Saturday, although the wind came in earlier. We had a slow sail out of Holy Loch, but the wind came picked up as we passed the Ardmore Cardinal at the entrance, and we had a lovely fast sail home, touching 5 knots at times.

No submarine movements impeded our progress and we headed up the Loch a little to see Hanako on her mooring. We had met them on the rally and it was good to see where they kept the boat.

We got the sails down and Julian helmed us, very slowly, onto our mooring after a lovely weekend away.