HOME WATERS ACROSS THE CELTIC SEA

Dragging the crew up from their self imposed isolation, nearly 30 hours into our passage, was met with a few grumbles, until they clambered up on deck. Even the most hardened of teenagers would have struggled not to be impressed with the striking scenery opening up ahead of them and no one on board needed reminding which film these islands had featured in. We hovered off Skellig Michael to admire the 1,400-year-old monastic beehive huts perched high above us. As we approached Little Skellig, the film score we were all humming changed. It was now the Jurassic Park theme that filled the cockpit rather than Star Wars as we marvelled at the clouds of gannets circling above us.

In 2014 my family and I moved. We had lived in Milton Keynes, keeping  our 43ft Westerly Ocean, in Plymouth’s Mayflower Marina. Moving to the north west meant some rethinking was required, our conclusion being to spend a couple of summers travelling in a slow loop towards an eventual destination on the Clyde in Scotland. We journeyed south first, along the Brittany coastline as far as the Golfe du Morbihan and back, berthing for a winter in Port La Forêt and then