Tally Ho sails into England after 59 years overseas!

Well, it's six in the morning. We're in Baltimore, Ireland, and we have had a wonderful time here. We've been really well looked after, and I would love to be able to stay longer and to visit some more places on this beautiful coastline in this beautiful country, but we've got places to go, things to do, and we have to get to Falmouth, so we're going to leave here today. There's a good northwesterly breeze over the next couple of days that should take us down across the Irish Sea pretty well, so we're going to make use of that and get down around Land's End, around the Lizard, and into Falmouth, which will be the final part of this big and exciting journey, and a big step for me and the boat. On the land you can see behind me is the Isles of Scilly, and this is our first glimpse of the UK, and so that's quite exciting, and the Isles of Scilly are very beautiful. I'm really hoping to sail around and see them a little bit more, but for now we're going to be passing by continuing on to Falmouth, but great to see land this morning on my watch just after sunrise, and here we are coming into UK waters. So we had a pretty nice sail across the Irish Sea, a lovely departure from Baltimore at sunrise, and then the wind picked up quite a bit throughout the day. We had a couple of reefs in, and then it did ease into the night, and then this morning of course we saw the Scillys, our first sight of the UK, and then we've just passed them, and we're about to meet up with Pelew, the pilot cutter that Luke Powell built, his latest, biggest pilot cutter, and the one that I visited a couple of times during the build in Cornwall, and made videos about that. So you've probably seen this boat being built, and now we're going to meet up and we're going to see it sailing, and Luke's an old friend and helped me out when I was back learning how to build boats in Cornwall, so it's going to be really good to see him, see the boat, and then we'll continue off. They have to divert to Penzance, I think, and we'll continue on to Palmer. So we've been continuing our journey along into the English Channel with the coast of Cornwall on our port side, and it's beautiful to just see the land, see the UK, and the weather has been in our favor as well. The sun's come out. Unfortunately there's not quite enough wind to sail, or if we did we'd arrive in the middle of the night, so we are motoring in, but we're approaching the Lizard, which is the big peninsula just before you get to Palmer, and there's someone waiting to meet us just off the Lizard. It's my old friend, colleague, mentor, Ashley Butler, who taught me a lot, and he was also quite instrumental in this project. He was actually the person who first suggested that Tally Ho might be a boat worth looking at, so it's sort of all his fault, and I also called him a lot, especially in the early stage of this project, to ask his advice. So it'll be really nice to see him and show him the boat, and he's come out to meet us on a pilot cutter. Of course the pilot cutters used to come out to bring the pilots to the big ships to bring the ships in. Now we're not a big ship, but Ash is going to get rowed from the pilot cutter to Tally Ho to join us and pilot us in. Looks like we might want a little more staysail. Okay, we're in Falmouth. We just came in past Black Rock in Falmouth Harbour now. We had a really nice escort in. Lots of beautiful boats, lots of gaffer rigs out there. So nice to see, and going to just throw in a couple of tacks in the harbour here, probably a drop sails, and pick up a mooring buoy, but feels pretty amazing to be here. Quite a few familiar faces out on the water as well, old friends and things, so yeah, just feel feel pretty amazing right now. Well done. Thanks for coming out. All right, thanks. Okay, coming up. He's a sheep. Nice to see you. Like your mainsheet properly cooled up and everything, or do you want to get some more? No, let's do that tomorrow. Just clean? Just bare minimum. Tidy. Tidy enough. Beer and fish and chips is cooling. Oh yeah. Well, we made it, and what a wonderful welcome we had. So nice to see so many boats out. I'm really grateful to everyone who came out and showed up and cheered us on into Falmouth, and what a fantastic voyage it's been from Ireland and across the Atlantic, and before that from Canada a year ago down the coast of North America and through the Panama Canal. Many, many amazing memories and passages and miles and people along the way, and it feels incredible to be here now. I left Falmouth in my folk boat in 2014, and of course I visited since then, but this is really me moving back on a different boat many years later, and so it feels quite momentous, quite surreal, but really fantastic, and it's all really thanks to people that have supported me along the way and this channel and this boat and this project. Many, many people in all sorts of different ways, and I'm really grateful to all of them, and now I have to figure out what to do next. It's quite overwhelming actually to be back here, so I'm going to take a little rest. I've got to go see my family, so I'm going to probably just put the boat away for a few days somewhere safe and pack up the crew all on their way, and I'll go around and sort of just get a little bit of rest, see family, and then come back to the boat and figure out what's next. But thank you so much for watching, for being a part of this. I'm so grateful to so many people, and I'm just in a little bit of shock about being here, and that's it. That's about all I have to say, so thanks, and we'll see you next time. Cheers!