FIERCE TIDES - Sailing to the Irish Sea | Sailing Florence Around Britain Ep.194

The season is changing in Scotland and it's time for us to sail Florence south. In this episode we sail 230 miles from the Outer Hebrides to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, dealing with breakages and repairs along the way. We have sailed over 50,000 miles on our 37-foot sailboat Florence, seeking out stunning tropical locations around the world. Now we are looking for something different, sailing north to explore the spectacular scenery and wildlife in colder waters. We are Matt and Amy and this is Sailing Around Britain. We have been enjoying exploring the remote Outer Hebrides in Scotland, but this is no place to be in the winter storms. So it is time to point Florence south and make some miles whilst the weather allows us to do so. The wind filled in last night so we left Cabe Island first thing this morning and we're heading to the Sound of Mull. It's about 65 miles to get there so it's going to take us most of the day. We've got a fairly grey day again today but it's actually a fantastic day for sailing because we've got very consistent winds and we're sailing on a reach which is Florence's fastest point of sail. So we're consistently doing about six and a half or seven knots which means that we should easily get into the Sound of Mull before it gets dark tonight. And the reason that we're sailing to the Sound of Mull is because we've got another gale on the way so we're hoping that there should be a very sheltered place for us to hunker down for a few days and wait for that to blow through. It's really nice to be sailing in daylight and also without any fog we've got a fair amount of visibility which just makes it much more pleasant sailing. more sheltered sailing area than the Outer Hebrides and hence there are a lot more yachts based around here. Sailing down the Sound of Mull we couldn't sail past Tobermore which is famous for the pretty colourful buildings. They appear on so many pieces of artwork that you see. It's a beautiful picturesque little town, good ice creams as well but unfortunately we haven't got a lot of time to explore here because the next gale is coming in and we need to sail a little bit further down the Sound to a more sheltered lock where we can anchor because apparently the waves get in here with a northerly gale and so it won't be very comfortable in here. But it's a great place to have a little look around, stock up with water, gas and food and then we'll go and hunker down for the next gale. The weather soon turned and we headed out into the rain to find a more sheltered anchorage before the wind increased. When the weather improved we beat south between the islands. So far Florence has held together brilliantly for the whole of this shakedown sail around Britain after her refit. However this was where we faced our first proper breakage. We had a failure of our staysail when we were sailing down here. Nothing dramatic it was just a bit of a pop and suddenly we lost all tension in the staysail halyard and it looks like we just had a failure of the crimp at the bottom that crimps the torsion rope around this eye. So I'm just going to cut the heat shrink tubing off of this and just see what we've got underneath but it just looks like this is slipped out. It didn't cause anything dramatic and we just dropped the staysail straight away just to make sure we didn't get any damage. Failed it and dropped it on the deck. So inside here I'm expecting to find a metal crimp that should have held the two ends together. Yeah, oh two crimps. Okay so I imagine, I don't know, I'm going to find out but I imagine that these would have been crimped in a hydraulic crimping press and you can see where this one has been squeezed at the sides here but this one maybe hasn't been squeezed enough and that's why it came apart. Actually I don't even know if that was one crimp or two if that's supposed to be together. We will find out. I don't think this is a major issue. I don't think it's a big fix as long as we can find the right tool but it's a bit annoying because we use, we love this staysail. We've been using it so much on this trip around Britain it's become really our go-to sail and we're going to have to sail back down the Irish Sea without it which is not really a problem because we can just reef the genoa, furl the genoa more but as you furl the genoa it doesn't hold its shape as well. Once you furl any sail like that beyond a certain point it becomes not as good a shape whereas the staysail if we switch to this it's a really nice shape so we'll just be a bit less efficient and it'll put a little bit more strain on our genoa in the winds when we'd normally change over to the staysail. We've still got the storm jib which we can use if it gets really windy so we haven't really got a problem it's just annoying. The sail loft are going to take the sail back to work out what went wrong and fix it along with checking the crimp on the other end for us. It's the only crimp failure that they've had. At this stage it looks like a human error using the wrong size die in the crimp tool and the process will be updated to prevent this happening again. Sailing around the UK we haven't been in the water as much just because the water is so much colder but when we were in a few weeks ago we noticed that we'd lost the zinc anode off the end of our propeller. We'd seen it a few times from the dock when we looked under the boat so it hadn't been gone long but it took us a while to find a replacement and then the last couple of weeks it's just been too windy and the boat's been getting blown around in anchorages and it's been really choppy to actually swim under the boat and replace it but today we've got a lovely calm anchorage. We're only in about four meters of water so if we drop any tools or the anode then we can go and get them off the bottom. It's a nice clean sand bottom so this is an ideal opportunity to jump in and replace this but unlike in the tropics I'm not doing it without a wetsuit. The anodes are important to stop our propeller from being eroded by stray electrical currents. First I cleaned off the end of the prop to ensure a good electrical connection between it then it was time to bolt on the new anode. Getting the first bolt in is always the hardest. This is not the first time we've had to replace anodes in the water as we don't haul out every year. Here I'm just making sure the anode is seated properly before finally tightening the three bolts that hold it on. We don't have any antifoul on the propeller because specialist propeller antifouls are expensive. As we have been in warmer waters we choose just to jump in and clean it off every so often. Perhaps we should invest in some antifoul for it now the water is so cold. With the anode fitted Matt got on with giving the propeller a clean whilst I gently wiped the slime from the hull. The antifoul is doing a good job and this is the first time that we've touched it days and it would be very tempting to prolong our stay here in the Scottish islands and just enjoy it for a little bit longer but the weather forecast is showing that we have got a great opportunity to sail down the Irish sea because the prevailing wind direction is from the southwest which would be dead against us normally but for the next few days it's going to be coming from the northeast which will allow us to potentially sail downwind. So we're going to make the most of the weather and set off down the Irish sea hopefully stopping in two places on the way first the Isle of Man and then Dublin in Ireland. The passage from here on gear to the Isle of Man needs some careful planning though. It's only about 100 miles but because we're going through the north channel which is the narrow gap between Scotland and Ireland we need to really carefully plan for the tides because the tide really whistles through there. Although we're going to be sailing for 17 hours which means that we're going to face a tide going both ways we want to time it so that we get the best of the tide helping us through the narrowest point and avoid being that point of the strongest tide when it's against us. But that isn't the only tidal limitation. When we get to the Isle of Man we want to visit the harbour of Peel which has a tidal sill so you can only get into the inner harbour two hours either side of high tide. So not only did we need to plan the time that we're going through the north channel to get the best of the tide there we also need to arrive within a four hour window when we can actually get into the inner harbour. So working out the timings with the tide and the weather we think it's going to work best for us to set sail this evening and sail overnight to the Isle of Man. We should hopefully arrive around midday which is just when there is enough tide or the tides have risen enough for the sill to open and we can enter the inner harbour. Oh Isle of Man here we come. It's been a little while since we sailed overnight. I think last time was back from St Kilda but tonight we should have a it's almost a full moon it's almost a full super moon so it should be a bit brighter and easier to see as we're sailing. It's been so bright actually that it's been shining through the hatch and waking me up in the night. We've got a friend when we were sailing across the Indian Ocean he was a single hander and he used to time his departure for night passages or week-long passages for when there was a full moon purely so he had more light to see at night. Just because it it does make your life so much easier when you can see better. Yeah you can see he's trimmed so I can see what's going on around you without need for a head torch or anything so yeah we shouldn't need any torches tonight. We're pretty much straight into our night watchers so I get the seabirth for the first three hours and then we'll swap over. So comfy in here. Just approaching the Mullican Tire and we've got just over four knots of tide with us now absolutely flying along we're doing 10.8 knots over the ground. I'm really glad we've got the tide right here we haven't got this against us because we'd be going nowhere. 11 knots over the ground now, flying. The tide really rushes around this point. We're making good progress overall but it's definitely not being consistent. We've been doing anything from the 13 knots with the tide when Matt was on watch earlier in the night to at times we've only been making one knot and at one point during Matt's watch he even had to turn the engine on. I think it's just as we're passing the headlands we're getting the wind shadow from the land and so it's very gusty and and also very shifty so sometimes we're sailing upwind sometimes we're sailing downwind. I've lost count of the number of times that we've had to reef at a reef but we are getting there. The sun's just starting to poke above the clouds and we've got about 25 miles left to sail so hopefully we should make it there in time for the silt to allow us to get into the inner harbour. With the wind and tide being so variable along this passage it's very difficult to accurately predict when we will arrive so we aim to be a little early as we can always slow down on our approach. 11.43 is when it opens. I think we're just going to be going on time, maybe slightly early. That's slightly early is okay isn't it? The Isle of Man. Cool, welcome to the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man is a self-governing British Crown dependency. That means that the UK is responsible for its military defence and international representation but the Isle of Man has its own parliament which manages domestic matters. The islanders are known as the Manx people. I really like it here. It's a nice seaside town and you don't have to be here long to get a real sense that you're in the Isle of Man. There seems to be a very big sense of pride and identity with the Manx people because the three-legged symbol of the Isle of Man is absolutely everywhere. One of the things the Isle of Man is known for food-wise is smoked kippers and we saw this sign saying kippers by post which we thought would be a real laugh to send some in the post. I'm not sure if I really want to receive some kippers in the post but since mum said this was a place for kippers we were going to send her some in the post. Sadly it's shut so no kippers for you mum. Luckily it's not just kippers that you're recommended to try when you're on the Isle of Man but also queenies which are queen scallops and they're supposed to be very popular on the island. They're still hot to try some. These were just flash fried in butter. Delicious. Really lovely. These are mine yeah? You can always get some more. Can I try one? Yeah sure. That's really good. Really good. Nicely cooked. Yeah perfectly cooked. Melt in the mouth almost. So we've made it to the big city of the Isle of Man, the capital of Douglas. We didn't come here by boat with Florence, instead we came on the folding bikes over the heritage trail which is about an 11 mile cycle from Peel through the countryside which is absolutely beautiful. The marina here in Douglas has got the same setup as in Peel. They've got a tidal seal and a bridge to get into it but in Peel I think it's got a little bit more of a nice cultural feel with the castle on the end and it's a smaller town other than being the big main city. We haven't actually got that long here on the Isle of Man because the weather, our most northerlies that have been helping us down the Irish sea are going to change soon and we want to make the most of the tail end of those to get across to Dublin and Ireland so we're going to try and make the most of just a couple of days here to see as much as we can and in order to do that we're going to now go and catch an old tram up to the highest point on the island. Here on the seafront in Douglas there's a very small castle. It's not actually supposed to be a castle, it is a sanctuary or a place of refuge because that rock apparently was responsible for the damage and sinking of a lot of ships so the guy who actually founded the RNLI advised to build a sanctuary for wrecked mariners and it also acts as a warning to say of the Isle of Man which is 2036 feet above sea level and you can see England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales from here. You win some you lose some. It wasn't cloud when we set off from the boat this morning but by the time we've been around all Douglas and got the train up here it's definitely not much of a view. We were trying to pack in as much as we could to try to see as much as possible in a short time which is why we got the train up here but even the train up here it was a bit like we'd inadvertently got ourselves on a bus tour holiday or a coach tour. It was just absolutely packed and you couldn't see anything out the windows either so I wouldn't really recommend that one. We decided to head back down below the cloud layer and see what else the Isle of Man is known for. We're at the Great Laxey Wheel which is probably the most iconic landmark on the whole of the Isle of Man. It was built in 1854 to pump water out of the lead mines which are further up the valley into the hills and it's now the oldest largest still working water wheel in the world. It's absolutely huge the diameter of the water wheel is 22 meters. Next time we sail down the Irish sea and the weather gives us a chance to stop in at the fabulous Isles of Scilly. For extra updates in between these bi-weekly videos and to find out what we're up to in real time, head over to Patreon and join the crew. Of course don't forget to subscribe to make sure that you don't miss the next episode here on YouTube. Continuing our voyage on Florence would not be possible without the support of our patrons. Thank you to all of you and especially to our star patrons.