Rathlin Island tides, Islay and another Small World Moment

 

Glenarm

After the calm stop-over at Glenarm we had another windless day for the easy 24 mile motor up the Antrim Coast to Rathlin Island, which lies five miles off the top corner of the mainland. At least, it should have been easy! The tides between the mainland and island are notoriously fierce so we used the Irish Cruising Club tidal guide to arrive just at the last of the NW-going flow. We were therefore more than a bit embarrassed to find the tide turn against us an hour before it was predicted so we had to do a slow crawl for the last couple of miles against almost 5 knots of water rushing the wrong way! Local experts later confirmed that our timing should have been perfectly good but that the waters around the island can do strange things, particularly at Spring Tides.

Never mind, we arrived into the little harbour of Church Bay with its three visitor pontoons, had a quick drink in McQuaig's Bar (which was full of locals dressed smartly for a young lad's first communion that had taken place that morning) and then bought an overwhelming amount of excellent fish 'n' chips from the Hungry Seal takeaway trailer.

Church Bay - unfortunately the sunshine was short-lived

Serves One (hungry seal) - this was only about 60% of the chips provided and they'd run out of mushy peas.

With Monday dawning wet and windy, thoughts of a hike ashore were shelved and instead we had a fast 24nm sail north to Port Ellen in Islay. The little marina here is surprisingly busy with visiting yachts and the vacant berth we picked has proved to be a bit uncomfortable in the wind-chop. The visibility has remained very poor and it's still blowing quite strongly so we'll stay here a couple of nights and try to get in a distillery tour while we're here.

Meanwhile, we've had another of our famous Small World moments, where we meet someone or something that we know from many miles away - 3980 miles away in this case. A 65ft ex-racing yacht came in to the marina this afternoon with a crew of 14 Swedes and we recognised the design. It's a Farr 65 and we raced against the very same boat (in a sister-ship) during Antigua Sailing Week, back in 2004.

The Farr 65 next to Maunie - note the low cloud and poor visibility

The black-sailed boat (chasing ours) is our new neighbour. Bengt, the current owner, was very happy to be given a copy of the racing photo!

Finally a day of indoors stuff, thanks to the indifferent weather gave us a chance to catch up on some reading and we found that the local newsagents had a copy of Practical Boat Owner which contains a 6-page article written by Graham. We're very pleased with how the finished article turned out and Graham even appears on the cover!

Copyright prohibits posting a copy here but the editorial highlights our story:

Nice Editorial - shame they got our home port wrong! Of course it should say 'Dartmouth'.