SECRET IRELAND

There is no right or wrong way to sail round Ireland. The weather is so beguilingly variable, and now and again so capriciously vile, that you might as well toss a coin. Or better, decide which bit you really want to see, and head there first. The point of our voyage was to revise the Irish Cruising Club Sailing Directions, carrying a drone to update the aerial pictures. We had 11 weeks, which is ample, although the current record is believed to be four years, a truly Herculean achievement.

We sailed from Oldcourt, County Cork aboard our Warrior 40, Coire Uisge and spent two nights in the newly refurbished North Harbour on Cape Clear Island, the southernmost inhabited part of Ireland. Next day, at anchor, we tested the flight deck. We should really have tried this first alongside a pier. I had made up a board to sit across the dinghy davits, to avoid the rigging. The drone came back, sat hovering six feet out from the stern and glared at us, or to be precise, at the backstays: too clever by half.

Over the next week, in calm and mostly sunny conditions, and having read the drone manual, we, the World Heritage Site of Skellig Michael, a precipitous 700-foot Kerry island with jaw-dropping medieval monastic remains, is so overrun withdaytrippers that a yacht’s crew may be officially repulsed. Armed with some insider advice from the ferrymen at Portmagee, we noted that the 12th-century historian Geraldus Cambrensis had described the miraculous appearance of wine for the daily Masses at the monastery. That’s a hint…