A pigeon and sea shanties

We had picked up a stowaway, a racing pigeon, about 40 miles south of Ireland. We left a bun out for him and he made a great mess on the deck as he demolished it.

The wind died during the night so at 03.46 we dropped the sails and were motoring towards the Isles of Scilly.
We discovered that for some reason the domestic batteries were not being charged by the engine so we steered by hand the rest of the way to Falmouth.

We were still north of Scilly at 09.15 when our stowaway left us. I hope we had brought him closer to home and not future away.

As the morning warmed up it burnt away the haze and the sun came out, soon got hot and dried the decks.
We began to slap on the sun screen and I was sorry I hadn't brought the bimini.

Having gone south of the traffic separation zone we rounded Lands End at at 14.00 and headed east for the Lizard before then heading north towards Falmouth.
It seemed to take ages to head around the Lizard and up close was much larger than I remembered.

The wind picked up and we unfurled the genoa and we had a lovely sail until we reached the mouth of the harbour.
We motored the rest of the way and having seen that the Harbourmasters pontoons were full with many rafted up, we instead tied up at the nearby Port Pendennis Marina at 19.30 and plugged in the shorepower to charge the batteries..

Every body in the marina office had gone home so we just plugged in and wandered up the town to have a look around.

I was surprised to see a banner hung across the main street for the ‘Molgoggers’ a local Cobh sea shanty group who were appearing at a festival in the town. Unfortunally I would be in Lymington when they were here.

We had a pint ashore but as we were tired and soon returned to Eureka and had a pleasant night’s sleep.Read more