A decent sail at last!

We left Peel at 7am. The wind was very light in the harbour and I changed up to the No. 1 jib. Probably the wrong place to make the decision but it turned out to be a good one.

We got the sails up in the outer harbour, near the visitor's buoys and headed straight out. It's roughly 28 nm to the edge of Strangford Lough and just a little north of west. We didn't want to get there until the tide turned in our favour, but being late wouldn't be too much of a problem.

The forecast was for southerly winds, maybe with some west in them, F5 at first and then dropping.

That turned out to be pretty accurate and, once clear of St Patrick's Isle we had rather more than we needed with all plain sail. But a deep reef in the main went in really easily and we let the staysail halyard off and the boat balanced nicely. The sea state was a bit lumpy but nothing to knock us back and Robinetta set herself in the groove at around 4½ knots. After an hour, I took the helm from Alison and felt the wind had dropped enough to set the staysail properly again and we carried on as a proper cutter. We took turns hour on hour all the way across. The sea state was worst near Man and was pretty flat after that.

In the middle, a cargo ship came south doing a very good impression of being on a collision course. We watched and watched and it looked like we might pass ahead of her but wisdom prevailed and I came off the wind to pass her port-to-port and go behind. We got and returned friendly waves with the crew on the bridge. It was really close!

Then we had a little rain - several dozen drops. After that the wind dropped a fair bit and we shook the reefs out of the main. It really was a cracking sail all the way.

The timing worked out perfectly as well. As we got to the Strangford Lough safe water mark we saw a yacht coming out on the last of the ebb but we never felt the tide against us. In fact the same yacht turned around and came back in again with us.

We hit about 7½ knots coming through the Routen Wheel, on almost a dead run with the tide strengthening under us and then put the engine on as we got near the twin beacons of Gowland's rock and Salt Rock. We could stem the tide easily so our speed must have been wind as much as tide powered. We got the sails down and motored into the marina. As expected, the marina didn't respond on either VHF or phone, but we got a grand welcome anyway and were helped in to a berth.

The best sail so far this year. That's what passage making should be like. None of this motoring into headwinds.