Day 12 - Into Cymru!

Angle Bay

Dried up near the local squires sea wall

Milford Haven Gas processing plant. (Hummed most of the night!)

Sea Dog

Another sea dog

 A good offshore breeze was blowing as we sailed away from Bude at stupid o' clock.

This turned into something rather more fruity once we got off a bit. It must have been at the top end of f4 but with some quite sharp edged big gusts coming off the cliffs. It all got a bit much (never happy with this wind are we?) And decided that the safe thing to do would be to drop a reef in and sail towards Hartland Point where the wind would either steady or we could bale out into Instow.

The reefing process went ok, which was encouraging and things stabilised somewhat for the fetch to the headland. At the headland the wind did ease and steady which gave us the shove we needed to shake out the reef, bear off, set the spinnaker and begin the Great Crossing.

Spinnaker carried us almost to Lundy where it had to be put away for a fast F3-4 two-sail reach across. Lots of guilliemots and Shearwaters playing tag with boat as we went.

Once we were more or less across we bore down onto a run and gybed down to the St Gowan cardinal Which kept us clear of the overfalls. Eventually we felt confident enough to switch on the ripstop motor and we had a very fast (over 20kts apparently) run down to the entrance to Milford Haven. This was Double Sovereign showing us what she could do in the right circumstances.

We even considered going for our first 100mile day and going the whole hog around St David's to Fishguard. Wiser counsel prevailed. We hadn't really studied the charts for the Welsh coast properly and we were also both pretty cold by this point.

We sailed into Angle Bay and dropped the new anchor into the mud at the entrance to the small river by the village. As the tide rose we were able to also make fast to the jetty and looked forward to a quiet night on the mud.

The lifeboat coxswain/moorings officer was to hand to give us permission to stay the night.

The following day looked a bit too windy to attempt the very tricky rounding of St David's. We'd check in the morning but a day off looked likely.

Bristol Channel Shearwaters