Sunday 31 May Caernarfon still.

Can’t believe we have been here 6 nights……. on the other hand, it also feels like 6 months (in a good way.) Good day today. Plenty of work done and we are both feeling ready to move on. Sorted out the quarter berth (again) to put Steve’s toolboxes (x5) and ready use toolbag (x1) in pole position.

This evening, after a busy day, we went for a walk, past Caernarfon Sailing Club (closed), past the Royal Welsh YC (closed), past the Anglesey (open but quiet) and over the swing bridge and past the 1908 vintage ship ‘Britain’ (being renovated.) Lovely stroll along the south coast of the Menai Strait. Wandered back for a quick snifter in the Black Boy and a natter before heading back to WM. Chloe (you will remember is JJ’s daughter – our quiz team mates from last night in the Royal Welsh YC) also works behind the bar in the Black Boy. Pleasant evening and back onboard to demolish the last of a bottle of Old Pulteney (purchased at the London Boatshow – back when there was one before the business idiots binned it – so the bottle was a tad old.

By the way, for Rod Cooper, the Royal Welsh YC HQ is shown in the photos

Bumped into 3 chaps, sailing Opal Legends x 2 around Britain anticlockwise. They are on Year 3 of their odyssey and their next target, like us, is Dublin. Maybe some sailing company……

Tomorrow HW Caernarfon is 1121A (BST) andwe are planning on departing at HW-1 Caernarfon – 1021A. Sooo, Probably slip around 0930 ish and get fuel, then loiter until we chose to depart. Actually the tidal gate is lowered from 0845, so the world is our mollusc.

As an aside, our Starling (100Gb a month) was simply not enough capacity as we are fiddling a lot with pictures n stuff, so we have just bumped it up to ‘unlimited’ to see how we get on. It is good but we are not used to being limited in the amount of capacity.

Orca is working very well. We had a problem with chart information until we realised that we were either too far from land (Starlink likes to work within 10 miles of land unless you pay them lots of wongah) or we had run out of data and the online charts weren’t ‘online.’ A bit like Navionics on your ipad, you need to download the charts.
We spent an hour or two downloading all we need onto our 3 Android tablets and 2 iphones. I guess we ought to load up the Macs as well at some stage. Still trying to decide whether we need the Orca Core unit for what we are doing – it will give a good GPS/GLONASS position and a logbook facility but are we ready to part with 500 quid for the privilege? Jury’s out at the moment.Read more