Heading Back Down

 We spent a peaceful night on the Yorkhill pontoon. This is a council run pontoon, and needs to be booked ahead. 

We left the pontoon at 09:55, as soon as we saw that the bridge had swung open. We had meant to follow Waverley through it, but leaving before her meant we might be able to get to the Renfrew bridge and share the swing there too rather than needing our own.

We got a great view of the Glenlee as we motored towards the bridge. 

Waverley took a lot longer to get moving than we expected, and she did not come past us until we were passing Braehead. 

Her wake kicked up a in the narrow channel, reflecting back from the sides to toss us about quite a bit. I was glad we had not waited to follow her under the Govan-Partick bridge.

The tide was against us, so we had the engine on full revs to try not to fall too far behind Waverley as she headed for the Renfrew bridge. I was very aware that this was a road bridge. They had promised to keep it open for us until 11:30 if they needed to, but we made it by 11:00, and they closed it behind us immediately.

Once we were through the bridge I lowered the revs, and spent more time looking round. There was quite a bit of rubbish in the river, but the most immediately obvious was this sewage treatment? outflow. It smelt like laundry liquid, and foamed up like it too.

The river was very quiet until we passed Old Kirkpatrick. After this we saw a tug heading up stream, and a small cabin cruiser. Several yachts passed us as we got to the Tail of the Bank, heading upstream to the James Watt marina.

There was one large ship motoring down river after us, I first spotted her as we passed Dumbarton, but she kept the the speed limit, and we were clear of the channel before she reached Greenock.

What little wind there was was on the nose or close to it all the way down river, and even when we had space to raise the main sail it was too light to use. All the yachts we saw were motoring, and our engine stayed on and only our stay sail up all the way back to our mooring. We got there at high water, making for a much easier trip ashore in Worm. She had stayed tied peacefully to the buoy while we were away. This was one of the few trips that she did not join us on.