The Norwegian sea to the irish sea

Enterprise over-wintered in the water at Stavanger awaiting her second new mast  after our 2009 season. (see Northern Denmark & Norway)  We were looking forward to a cruising season with a bit less excitement. However, the first event came from an unexpected source; the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland. All flights to Norway were cancelled due to the ash clouds so we started our season by touring Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish Highlands while we waited for a flight from Aberdeen. Finally arriving in Stavanger we found that we still did not have a mast and trepidation really set in.

Our First Setback

The Second Setback

The 2010 Cruise - Go To Google Earth for the Full Version

However, by May 9th we cast off to begin our cruise. The full route can be seen by following this link to Google Earth, The Norwegian Sea to the Irish Sea,  make sure that you have the ‘temporary places’ box ticked when it is open. Clicking on the yellow push pins will open log entries.

The West Coast of Norway

 The first leg was from Stavanger to the Shetland Islands by way of Bergen. The West coast of Norway is very rugged, facing the storms of the North Atlantic but has strings of offshore islands behind which one can shelter. In fact, one can go all the way North to the Lofoten Islands dodging in and out behind islands, but that was too far North for us.

Anxious to get away, we started off with a brisk breeze on the nose and as we headed into the open sea it became uncomfortable with little progress being made at full throttle. This was no way to start the season so we decided to change course to go behind the islands of Bru & Sokn.
There was a bridge to go under but it was posted at 16 metres clearance and our air draft was 15.23m so there should not be a problem. Now when you sail under a bridge and look up it always looks as if you are going to hit it even if there are several metres of clearance. I do the calculation three times and if it is OK I don’t look up; it is less stressful that way.

The Alternate Route Where We Hit the Bridge

Only afterwards did I notice the antennae and tri-light hanging down! Later we determined by marks on the tri-light that we had cleared the mast by 2cm. The strong wind had created a tidal surge that I had not allowed for and could not calculate. We tied up that night at Utstein Kloster that we had visited the previous autumn but this time it was cold and windswept. Here we discovered that we had a dead cell in our deep cycle battery; these things always happen at inconvenient moments. Then after setting off next morning it started to snow quite hard, the first and, I hope, the last time that we sailed in a snow storm. We consoled ourselves by saying that it could only get better after that, and it did.

 Bergen has the reputation as the European city with the most days of rain but the Gods must have repented for it was a lovely day to sail into the harbour, with the sun highlighting the old, picturesque houses climbing up the mountainside from the wharf.

Entering Bergen Without Rain!

This is the home of Eduard Grieg and there are daily lunchtime concerts throughout the summer at the composer’s home, with its modern museum and concert hall. This city is another one that was in the Hanseatic League, like the ones that we had visited in the Baltic, and which grew rich on the trade monopoly.

Shetlands Gang DVD

We were watching the weather closely for a favourable window to cross to Shetland for there was no appetite for a  repeat of last year;  the Norwegian Sea does not have any better reputation than the North Sea. So we left sooner than we would have liked (vowing to return) for the crossing to Lerwick, the capital. There is an annual, commemorative crossing of small boats from Norway to Shetland in honour of ‘The Shetland Bus’.  If you have not read the book or seen the film, you should, for this is the story of the fleet of small fishing boats that sailed in appalling weather during the Second World War to keep a supply line open to the Norwegian Resistance.  There is also a Norwegian film with English subtitles.

Our crossing was ’a piece of cake’ compared to theirs but we were very much aware of history when we slipped out of Klapp Holmen on Friday night.

Arriving on Monday morning we were immediately struck by the lack of trees; this must be a very bleak place in the winter, however, there is a wild beauty to these islands that spoke to us. 

The Route From Stavanger to Scotland

Our First View of Shetland

We have often noticed that people who live in harsh conditions are usually warm and welcoming; Shetlanders were no exception.
The Viking roots there are very strong with the language full of Old Norse terms; it is a very distinctive culture. There may not be many trees but there are huge numbers of sea birds. Taking the local bus to the Southern tip of the main island to visit Sumburgh Head , we marveled at how close we could get to nesting Fulmars, Guillemots, Kittiwakes, Puffins and Shags. We had previously only seen these birds in small numbers but here it was overwhelming.

A Traditional Shetland House

Sumburgh Head Bird Sanctuary

Nesting Fulmars

Shetland Ponies

 As a bonus there was the Jarlshof Prehistoric & Norse Settlement to see before we set sail for Fair Isle

Jarlshof Prehistoric & Norse Settlement at Sumburgh Head

Fair Isle is an isolated island without a regular ferry service and only accessible by small aircraft so it was a great opportunity to visit it in our own yacht.

Isolated Fair Isle

 This 5km by 3km island with its 70 inhabitants has given its name to a knitting pattern known all over the world. Life has always been hard here and while the men raised sheep and went fishing the women spun the wool and knitted the distinctive sweaters. Follow this link to read this extraordinary story. There is one dock where the community-owned, ex-fishing boat cum ferry is docked, leaving room for two or three yachts but when we arrived we were the only one. There are no fences on the island and sheep roam freely, as do walkers, over the hilly, rough land. The views were wild and magnificent as we trekked to the Northwest headland. On our way back we must have gone too close to a nesting ground for we were aggressively dived at by Skuas.

Enterprise in Fair Isle

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The Dramatic North Coast

Dominating the island is Sheep Rock, sheer cliffs on all sides with a sloping, flat top, which from a distance looked like a lush green meadow. Discussion turned to Sheep Rock when a resident came to the dock to talk to the visitors. He said that he was the last person to graze sheep on it. In late Spring someone would scale the cliff and rig up a pulley and cable system to haul the sheep to the top, then when the sheep were all hoisted up they would be left all summer after which they were all hoisted down again; a very labour intensive process that is no longer reckoned to be worthwhile. 

Sheep Rock

The Export Trade Fair Isle Style

 One hundred and twenty kilometres South are the Orkney Islands; quite different, low, fertile and sandy, with strong tidal streams coursing between the islands so it is important to get the timing right.  They are much more closely related to the Scottish mainland, but still apart, and formerly speaking their own Orcadian language. Five thousand years ago people of the Neolithic culture landed here and settled. Everywhere there is evidence of ancient civilisations (including a complete Neolithic village ) overlain by Viking settlements giving a vague feeling of being in a time warp. Some of the cottages with their heavy stone slab roofs had a distinctly Neolithic air about them. We took a local bus to the Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle like Stonehenge but less well known. It is immense with 13 burial mounds near the circle. The walk towards it made us aware of many sites of Neolithic settlement and mysterious alignments.Previously we had visited Stonehenge but found this site in a sparsely settled landscape far more haunting.

Modern Neolithic Roofing

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The Ring of Brodgar and Ever Present Rain

Virtually nothing is known about this people, the meaning of their structures, how they could move stone slabs weighing several tons, or anything about their social system and psyche. They are still an unresolved mystery greater than the pyramids. We walked over this countryside and experienced feelings of awe and insignificance standing in the Ring of Brodgar and seeing in the distance other standing stones, each representing huge effort for no apparent reason that archaeologists have been able to fathom.
 

Maeshowe Cairn and the Entrance Tunnel

Accompanied by a guide, we entered the mound chamber of Maeshowe Cairn, almost crawling through the entrance tunnel. 900 years ago Viking seafarers had done the same thing to seek shelter from bad weather and passed the time by scratching runic writing on the walls with their axes. The guide could read that writing and it correlates with the Icelandic Sagas. These were not  primitive peasants but hardy seafarers who navigated their longboats around the North Atlantic and as far as the Eastern Mediterranean. Few modern men could do that. We were strangely moved.
 

The Story of the Norsemen

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 From Orkney we had to decide whether to to go down the West coast of Scotland by way of Cape Wrath or down the East side by way of John O’ Groats. We finally opted for the later as we wanted to transit the Caledonean Canal. Leaving Orkney after days of torrential rain  we passed the former Eastern entrance to Scapa Flow, the huge sheltered harbour that was a major naval base in the First and Second World Wars. ‘Former’ because, after a German uboat, U-47, slipped in in 1940 and sank the battleship Royal Oak and then escaped, Winston Churchill ordered the Eastern entrances dammed up. So we could only look into Holmen Sound and the ‘Churchill Barriers’, for it was too big a diversion to find the Southern entrance. A pity, because it is an interesting place. It was here that in 1919 the interned German Naval Fleet of 52 ships was scuttled by their crews simultaneously.

Churchill Barrier #1

Scapa Flow and the Eastern Barriers

The treacherous Pentland Firth was crossed without incident because we got are timing right and the weather was fair. All down the East coast of the Highlands the gorse was ablaze with yellow and we had frequent visits by porpoises. Altogether a delightful sail.

Orkney, The Pentland Firth and John O' Groats

The Eastern Highlands in Bloom

One of the surprises was how shallow the approach to Inverness was, the Moray Firth, which meant that the tide really rushed in and out; this was something that we had not allowed for in our timing so we struggled past Fort George and up to the Marina at Inverness.
Our plan was to cross Scotland  by the Caledonian Canal and then explore the Western Isles, fired I must confess by romantic dreams of Flora MacDonald ferrying Bonnie Prince Charlie ‘over the sea to Skye’. So  before leaving Inverness we thought that we should visit that icon of Scottish history, the battlefield of Culloden (1746). The Great Glen crosses Scotland like a great rift valley from Inverness in the East, to Fort William in the West and was for a long time the battle line for the English against the Scots. Hence Fort George, Fort Augustus and Fort William. It is at the Eastern end, near Fort George that the battlefield is located.

The Moray Forth, Inverness, Fort George and Culloden

Thus one evening, when a light rain was falling and a mist was rising off this boggy moorland we visited Culloden. In retrospect a most suitable atmosphere for this mournful place. We were the only visitors at that time of day when the adjacent visitors' centre was closed (we returned another day to view the interactive visitor centre). 

 The battlefield is well defined with flags marking the line of the Government troops and the starting line of the Highland (Jacobite) forces about half a kilometre of boggy ground apart. “Bonnie Prince Charlie’ had marched his men all night and they were tired and hungry facing well fed and rested Government soldiers. Many of the Clan chiefs advised against the battle but Charlie, with his inflated ego and well to the rear on his horse, insisted that they attack. A worse battleground could not be imagined with half the line having to charge through bog holes up to their thighs.

The Bleak and Boggy Battlefield

The Chieftains Get the Markers

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The Government troops stood their ground and mowed them down until the remaining , exhausted Highlanders were cut down in hand to hand combat. On that day something like 1,600 Highlanders died for the loss of 40 Government troops. Bonnie Prince Charlie did not even get his britches dirty for he turned and galloped off, being hidden in the Highlands, at great personal risk to his protectors, for 5 months before being smuggled to France. He never came back, became an obese drunkard in Rome and died of cirrhosis of the liver. So there was nothing very ‘bonnie’ about him; alas there goes another romantic illusion.

 The Caledonian Canal connects a string of waterways by 29 locks, the River Ness, Loch Dochfour, Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy. In fact,only 33km of its 97km is in man-made canals. The first, Loch Ness was disappointing with its tacky tourist resorts exploiting The Loch Ness Monster or ‘Nessie’. However, after ascending the flight of locks at Fort Augustus it became beautifully remote and unspoiled such that we extended our passage by spending extra nights at moorings.

In The Caledonian Canal

Sailing Past Ben Nevis

 The passage finally skirts Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, before descending by an impressive set of locks called ‘Neptune's Staircase’ to Loch Linnhe and the sea. 

Neptune's Staircase

Now we were set to explore the Western Isles. Sailing South down Loch Linnhe we turned West up the Sound of Mull to Tobermory. On the way we  anchored for a night in Choire Auch, an inlet that has no sign of life except for a single croft that looked abandoned, and a night in the beautiful Loch Aline where we went ashore in the dinghy to walk. Even in this short passage we had our excitement; halfway down Loch Linnhe we were somewhat aggressively boarded by a party of Border Agency agents and later we saw a ship on fire at the quayside at Glensanda. So there was enough to keep the adrenalin flowing.

Loch Aline

Tobermory

Tobermory is a pleasant tourist town and the logical jumping off point for the Western Isles. Our plan was to round Ardnamurchan and pass North of Skye through the Kyle of Lochalsh before crossing to Portree on the Isle of Lewis. However, it was not to be, as we had so often learned when sailing.

Our Plans For The Western Isles

On turning North out of the Sound of Mull one passes the headland of Ardnamurchan and we had been told that once passed you are entitled to tie a sprig of heather to the pulpit. We did that and it stayed there until it fell apart. It is a forbidding headland and, just to emphasize it, the rain started and did not seem to stop for the next four weeks as low pressure systems tracked across Western Scotland. We anchored for the night, in foul weather, at the island of Muck. This part of Scotland is very sparsely populated and many of the smaller islands are advertising for family units to come and settle because their populations have sunk  to below what is economically sustainable. The islands usually have a government funded jetty for the ferry but otherwise yachts must drop anchor and you go ashore in the dinghy.

 Then we spent two miserable days at anchor at Mallaig. The town was filled with depressed holidaymakers eating fish & chips in any shelter that they could find. Finally, with a string of gales forecast we abandoned our plans and beat a retreat to Oban where we holed up for 3 weeks until the weather improved. It was the worst June and July in living memory, so we drew the short straw that year.

  However, Scotland has a way of compensating.  When we were passing Ardnamurchan  again , in a temporary clearing of the weather, we were suddenly surrounded by porpoises, there must have been more than 100 for about a kilometre around the boat; some leaping in groups of 3 or 4, others singly but all in a feeding frenzy. It lasted about 10 minutes and then they were all gone. We were left breathless, realizing that we had witnessed something that very few  people have seen and that we would never see  again.

The Route from Oban to The Clyde

From Oban we went South, threading through rocky islands with strong currents and eddies that made it exciting. We wanted to visit the Clyde estuary and Glasgow  but in order to do this without a huge detour around the Mull of Kintyre it was necessary to transit the Crinan Canal. In the distant past we had lived in an old convoy assembly station at Kilcreggan on the Clyde and had never gone back to see it.

Enterprise Next to a Puffer

Waiting in the basin to enter the canal we found ourselves next to one of the last remaining ‘puffers’ in Scotland. Now ‘puffers’ are a much loved icon in this country, they are small steam driven coasters that were the lifeline to the hundreds of coastal islands. They carried everything imaginable  and could beach themselves on the sand to unload at low tide .

The Vital Spark at Inverary

 The earliest versions pulled barges on the Forth & Clyde Canal and because the water was fresh they had no condensers. They sucked water into their coal fired boilers directly from the canal and exhausted the steam up the smokestack, giving puffs of steam at each piston stroke; hence ‘puffers’. Of course when they evolved to sea-going vessels they could no longer do that. 

Even Beer!

They became iconic when a series of stories about a puffer called  ‘The Vital Spark’, and its irascible skipper ‘Para Handy’ ran for 20 years in the Glasgow Evening News from 1905. The last one in commercial service finished in 1993, killed by the roll-on roll-off  vessels that did not need unloading. Later we went up Loch Fyne to Inverary where there is a puffer called The Vital Spark complete with an effigy of Para Handy. It is ironic  that people pay big money for the privilege of shoveling coal, on a trip in a puffer. Old stokers must turn in their graves.

First Mate Muscle Power

Sailing in a Garden

 Now the Crinan Canal is a totally different kettle of fish to the Caledonian Canal since it is largely unchanged from when it was built  200 years ago, the 25 locks are all manually operated by the user so the passage is quite a feat of muscle power.

Navigating The Crinan Canal

 However, it makes up for it in natural beauty and, in places, resembles a  large (just wide enough for a puffer), overgrown and winding ditch rather than a canal. With vegetation overhanging the banks it felt at times that we were sailing through somebody’s garden; especially when branches caught in the rigging.

 Leaving the Crinan Canal we were in an area of lochs and islands that are accessible to Glasgow and the Clyde with its history as a great manufacturing and shipbuilding centre of the industrial age. In those days  this whole area was seething with activity, paddle steamers  took the city people for excursions to the seaside and puffers plied their trade. Today there are relics of this age all over the area, decaying Victorian piers with their wrought iron curlicues and rusting hulks of once proud vessels. The shipyards are gone and Glasgow has many derelict factories but the area is re-inventing itself into a cultural centre with many new buildings in the downtown, and rehabilitation of the Clyde estuary. There is much nostalgia for the Golden Age of the Clyde and enthusiastic restoration efforts are under way to save features before they are lost.

 Reaching Holy Loch, we tied up for a month while we took a ‘busman’s holiday’ crewing on a yacht on the South Coast of England; but before we left we went to see the place at Kilcreggan where we lived with a new baby at a time when accommodation was almost impossible to find. Although it was in better shape in those days we were appalled that we were forced to live there. How times have changed.

Home Sweet Home

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A Trident Submarine Leaving Base

 On our return to Scotland we were anxious to get on with our cruise and leave Holy Loch. At the mouth of the Loch we found that the passage had been pre-empted by a Trident nuclear submarine moving out from its base in the Gare Loch, with its flotilla of security vessels keeping all other shipping away. The timing was interesting for there was a national debate going on about whether or not the UK could, or should, maintain nuclear submarines. To add fuel to the debate, a couple of weeks later one of them ran aground off the Island of Skye in full view of people on the Skye Bridge; rich material for cartoonists.

Our course lay around the Isle of Arran and down the East coast of the peninsular called the Mull of Kintyre, which points like a finger to Northern Ireland, or Ulster. Over the last 50 to 60 years, great swaths of the Scottish countryside have been transformed from moors, bogs and infertile hillsides into coniferous forests. This was very evident as we sailed down the East side of the peninsular. Of course it makes good economic sense for nobody wants to live the life of a crofter scratching a living from infertile soil, but there is not much romance in looking at a coniferous plantation.  Near the southern end is Campbeltown, the last harbour on this sparsely populated part of Scotland. Here the brutal Atlantic gales sweep right across the end of the peninsular. The countryside struck us as rather bleak with its steep, rocky, wind blasted crags.

The Route From The Clyde to Belfast

 Although the sea between Scotland and Ulster is narrow at this point, the tides are great and the currents strong. Furthermore, there are no harbours suitable for yachts between Campbeltown and Glenarm, which is an 8 hour trip or longer depending on the weather. Now with a 12 hour tidal cycle it means that neutral, or favourable, currents are only available for 6 to 7 hours. On these types of passages, there is always a small window that one wants to occur at some reasonable time of day and which corresponds with reasonable weather.  There were some islands off the point that we would have liked to have visited but that would have meant that we would have missed the window and spent a rocky night at anchor, so we passed them up and pushed on. The most memorable part of this trip was leaving the bare, bleak Scottish landscape and arriving in the lush green shores of Ireland. The contrast could not have been greater; no wonder it is called the Emerald Isle. Thus we started on our exploration of Ireland.

 Glenarm is a small village that has obviously seen better days as can be judged by that invariable barometer, the number of pubs. Formerly there were three but now they are down to one and the Post Office has also shut down. However, surprisingly there was a goldsmith’s workshop that shipped its work to the capitals of Europe; this was the first of many anomalies that we were to encounter. The friendliness of the people was immediately apparent, they positively seek out an opportunity to strike up a conversation and everyone seems to have the time to chat. We were to learn later that if we looked at a map in the street people would immediately stop to ask if they could help.

Overlooking Glenarm

The Harbour Master was right in the mould, telling us of all the stuff that we could do around Glenarm and the Antrim Coast.

Social Contact Through Canaries

 The first was a walk around the village high up on the hills with good views of the town and harbour, but rather than the views what we most remember is looking over a garden wall to admire a great collection of unusual canaries in an aviary. The Owner spotted us and talked canaries to us for that was obviously his passion; he even invited us to go through his house to take a closer look.

 But there was an even bigger surprise, abutting the village were the grounds of a large country house, Glenarm Castle. The castle itself is very grand with turrets and porticoes but not open to the public except for one or two days per year.

The Walled Garden ay Glenarm Castle

 The same goes for the meadows and grounds except for a large walled garden that has been extensively restored to its former glory, now rivaling the great European gardens. Although really too late in the season for most gardens this one still appeared in full bloom, an anomaly caused by the micro climate and sheltering walls. We were quite taken aback by this discovery, spending several hours there and returning for a second visit. Glenarm Castle is the home of Viscount and Viscountess Dunluce and their family. The castle has been in the McDonnell family (the Lords of Antrim) since it was first built in 1636. The McDonnell's have been in Glenarm for nearly 600 years and the Estate has been in the family for 400 years. Later when we had read the history of Ireland and learned  of the Plantations we started to understand how these great houses, scattered throughout Ireland, fitted into the troubled history of the country.

The Devil's Causeway

We toured the Antrim coast by local bus for we could not move on without visiting  the Giant's Causeway and the home of Irish whiskey at Bushmills. The bus trip took us through the Glens of Antrim and gave us a view of the country and people that we could never have seen from a car.
Then it was on to Belfast, not actually Belfast but Carrickfergus in the bay since we did not want to take the ship into the dockyards. The most striking feature on approaching Carrickfergus is its Norman Castle, but we were heading for the  new marina, built in a town that had been a rather rough place judging by the shuttered shops covered in graffiti.

 This was to be a pattern in Ulster, money was being invested in projects in an attempt to revitalise run down and traumatised places. Later we took a bus tour of Belfast that traced the history of the ‘Troubles’ visiting the separating wall between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. The gates were still being closed at 6pm and all day at the weekends. Although the adjacent residential neighbourhoods are being demolished and redeveloped there is still plenty of evidence of underlying hatred.

Gates of Hatred

The Collective Memory of Hatred

 Everything is either catholic or protestant with flags to make sure you know which is which. We had the feeling that there were dark forces under the surface that may stay buried as long as the economy stays strong for a couple of generations. Looking at the places with famous names from the ‘Troubles’ like Shankhill Road and Falls Road we felt unbelievably depressed.  The city of Belfast was also going through major redevelopment, one can only hope that it can trigger social change.

From Carrickfergus we sailed South to the fishing port of Ardglass, near the border with Eire, passing the mountains of Mourne where they ‘sweep down to the sea’. It was a relief to refresh our souls with the beauty of the scenery but later we were to explore the countryside and found that echoes of the Troubles were nearby in towns like Newry, Armagh and Portadown.
Then it was on to Howth in Dublin Bay as our cruise drew towards its end.  

The Route from Ardglass to Neyland

 Suddenly the atmosphere felt quite different; gone was the underlying tension, people positively sought you out to chat, and they always seemed to have time to do it. Dublin was a hotbed of culture and we made the most of it with visits to three theatres, The Gate, The Abbey and Smock Alley, this latter one dating back to 1662; the Dublin Writers Museum and to the Book of Kells at Trinity College. The history of the ‘Easter Rising’ interested us and we saw key sites such as the General Post Office and others  while covering other places like the Oscar Wilde Memorial. Everywhere there were side walk cafes, especially along the banks of the Liffey, and we were like kids in a candy shop.

A Celtic Harp Over The River Liffey

 We could not resist the urge to dig deeper since we had read Edward Rutherford’s ‘Ireland Awakening’ and that history was all around us. Consequently we set off by car to cross Ireland and get a feeling for the country.

In fact our land trips were quite extensive as we searched for places that illustrated what we had read about Ireland.
Our explorations on land had previously been more local and we had seen the South coast on a previous cruise but this time we set off to ‘see the sun go down on Galway Bay’; and we did. The first night, somewhat tired we found a modest pub for the night in Ballinasloe. We turned in somewhat early, only to discover that it was the weekly Irish Dancing  class on the floor below with much stamping on the floor. So our quest for authenticity was satisfied.

Explorations by Land

Painting of the Battle of Aughrim

Next day we stopped at the marker for the Battle of  Aughrim.    There was nothing much to see but it was another Jacobite war, like Culloden that we had seen earlier, 7,000 people were killed on this spot; another squabble among kings where the people are pawns.

 The West Coast is mountainous, bleak and treeless with poor soils. Traveling North we appreciated the wild beauty but it must have been a hard life; a few potatoes and digging peat . The extent of peat digging can be seen from aerial photographs; the whole countryside is scarred.

West Coast Countryside

 We stopped to walk the boards of an operational peat digging and appreciated what back-breaking labour it was. How they survived is a mystery. 

Aerial View of Historical Peat Diggings

A Working Peat Digging

 Looping back to Dublin by way of Westport  we passed through Stokestowne, home of the National Irish Famine Museum. This was a fascinating place based in one of the country mansions in which the nobility lived; a fitting juxtaposition. After walking the galleries of old photographs showing starving faces and bodies; the peasants being shipped off to the New World in ‘coffin’ ships with their hovels being torn down so that they had to go, we were in a state of shock. We knew about it before but now it was somehow real and personal. Still in that state of mind we walked out into the immaculate grounds to see how the aristocracy were living with their spacious lawns, flower gardens and green houses. 

 One item really got to us. This landowner was growing pineapples for his table in a heated glass-house while he evicted his starving tenants! During this great famine food was being exported to England.

Contemporary Print of Evictions

While the Land Owner Lived in Luxury

 The history of Ireland is a long tragic history of man’s inhumanity to man, it is a wonder that modern Irishmen can smile at all.

Arklow Fishing Memorial

 The next port of call from Dublin Bay was Arklow a former fishing port at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. There is a rather apt monument here, a sunken fishing boat that was raised and mounted on the quayside to rust away. So many fishing ports have died, but then they all over-fished as if it would never end.
We toured the Wicklow  Mountains by road and saw a fertile and prosperous land compared with the West Coast.
But the season was getting late and the weather deteriorating. When we tried to leave Arklow we were beaten back ‘with our tails between our legs’.

So as soon as the weather eased up we left for Wexford. Well not right into Wexford Harbour for it is a shallow, shifting channel and we did not want to get caught in there by bad weather. 

Wexford Beach

So we dropped anchor off the beach on a beautiful evening intending to stay the night.
As with all sailing, the Gods (in the shape of the weather forecast) had other ideas and if we were to have any comfort in our crossing to Wales we had better leave right then. So up with the anchor and off for a night passage across the Irish Sea to Milford Haven and the end of our cruise. 

 That is how we ended up for the winter next to the ruins of the dock that was going to be the transatlantic terminal for Brunel’s great ship ’ The Great Eastern’, but that is another story.

 For other Cruising blogs see the Archive links in the sidebar at the top of this page.
Other blogs of interest are The Retirement Dream and How to Live Your Dream

 Technical Blogs are Nail Biting Experiences #1 Crossing the Bar , The Changing Nature of Sailing and Cruising and Yacht Docking Skills for Northern Europe