It took months of planning and preparations to have Sea Jay, my 27ft classic Rhodes 6-tonner ready for departure on 1 April, but as if to prove this was ‘All Fools Day’, the winds were storm force, waves were breaking over the bar at the entrance to Chichester Harbour and, to make matters worse, the auxiliary suddenly developed an intermittent fault, the revs running up and down the scale in uncontrolled and unpredictable bursts. I wasn’t expecting to have to engage Plan B in this adventure sail up to the Scottish Western Isles and back quite so early!
The course
My original plan had been to cross the Irish Sea either from Newlyn directly to Wicklow, the nearest port on the Irish coast, or via Milford Haven, depending on the wind, but after meeting Angus Mcphie, an old sailing friend in Plymouth who had cruised up to Scottish waters a few years before, his advice was to give Irish ports in the southwest a wide berth. “The shallow waters around there extend a long way out and are home to 100s of lobster pots.” He told me. Unlike his own fin and skeg configured cruising yacht, Sea Jay has a long keel extending right back to the rudder and simply rides over pot lines, but when I heard that Angus had been forced to call out the Wicklow lifeboat to tow his yacht to safety after wrapping a pot line around the prop, I took his advice and pointed our bows further north to Arklow as our first Irish port of call.
Having heard so many stories about post-Brexit red tape from sailors visiting France, I felt rather foolish tying up to the visitors’ pontoon in Arklow with an Irish courtesy flag, and yellow Q quarantine pennant fluttering in the rigging, and passport and ships papers to hand ready for a Customs inspection. No one troubled us for seven hours, and then it was only the marina manager wanting his 30 Euros for an overnight stay. I experienced the same lack
