Day 18: Housel Cove to St Michael’s Mount

Day 18: Housel Cove to St Michael’s Mount

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Time to head to Penzance (ish)!

Before setting off this mainly looked like a big sail upwind as we were in a northerly wind.

After 6 hours of sailing and a couple of tacks, we found ourselves nearing Penzance.

It was lovely and flat in the bay, even quite some way out and made for some very nice sailing.

Penzance Harbour is behind a sil and at the time of our arrival the sil was closed (we already knew this). We had the option of using a mooring ball outside the harbour, anchoring outside the harbour, and using a different anchorage.

St Michael’s Mount looked like it gave good protection (and a nice view) so we headed to it!

You can see us approaching the Mount below.

The anchorage was rather windy, we were sheltered there with 3 other boats, one of them arrived with us, re-anchored a few times and then decided to leave for somewhere else.

We stayed put in the winds, charged up a bit with the wind turbine and generally relaxed.

(In this sort of wind a trip to the shore in the dinghy is not really much fun)

By the evening, the wind had dropped and it was rather lovely.

Day 17: Helford River to Housel Cove

Day 17: Helford River to Housel Cove

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We wanted to break out the larger journey around to Penzance. We found an anchorage (Housel Cove) on Navionics that looked like it should give us pretty good protection from the swell and wind for the night and headed off!

This was an easy sail again only on a reefed genoa as we were trying to sail at 2-3 knots so we could fish with the paravane as we went.

Although we were ready for the fish, the fish were not there. Even while trying to sail slowly, you can see the bend in the rod as we occasionally hit 4+ knots.

The journey took only 4.5 hours and we found ourselves in Housel Cove which is overlooked by Housel Hotel and Lizard Lighthouse.

We were in the bay all by ourselves, and also had a beach that seemed to be mostly inaccessible from the land, so private for us!

We both got a little artistic on this day.

Kathryn took this very nice looking picture of the deck while we were sailing

Adam took this rather blurry, but perhaps nice to look at picture of Lizard Lighthouse at night from the bay.

Day 16: Falmouth to Helford River

Day 16: Falmouth to Helford River

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Back from a wedding, we wanted to get out of the pricey mooring that we were at and get back to anchoring, so on to the Helford river (a short hop across the bay).

As you can see on the track, we decided our trip would be far too quick, even only sailing with the genoa out.

So we did a few tacks and tried to get as close as possible to a beach where @brendonprince_ was having a little SUP (as he advertised on Instagram).

Didn’t manage to get super close to the beach, but did manage to get this little shot.

Over to Helford we went, maxing out at 7.3 knots with only the genoa (nice!).

The anchorage on the east side of the river was lovely.

Day 8: Saltash to Falmouth

Day 8: Saltash to Falmouth

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We originally planned on heading to Falmouth on Day 6, but ended up in Saltash instead avoiding some weather.

This was the first day that we experimented with weather routing using Fast Seas. You can read a bit about weather routing on Wikipedia, and can take a look at us chatting away about Fast Seas weather routing for Nic 38s on the owner forums.

We had 3 different routes planned with a set of parameters that we were at that point unsure of.

  • Optimistic: Based on a theoretical good into wind angle of 45 degrees. This would take us around 8 hours.
  • Pessimistic: Using a polar that we created from what we thought our actual sailing performance was from back in 2020 and 2021. This would take us around 18 hours.
  • Middle ground: Based on a theoretical “normal” into wind angle of 60 degrees. This would take us around 12 hours.

So quite a range of times.

Each route took us right out into the channel, and with a single tack back all the way into Falmouth.

We went for it, planning for all 3 (or other eventualities), and the middle ground route ended up being roughly what we achieved. We were sailing on our closest point of sail the whole way with 1m swell from the west and 15-25 knts generally from the west.

In the image below you can see the middle route we managed, as well as 2 way points indicating the tack points of the other 2 routes.

Due to the single tack the voyage was quite pleasant 🙂

Instagram Post (June 27)

We headed to a marina, as we had a wedding to attend and wanted to keep Hannah safe and out of the way of others. We arrived in the evening so spent that evening on a visitor pontoon rafter up next to a very lovely yacht that had just come back from the Azores.

So many boats anchored up hiding away from the winds to come.

On day 9 we moved to the inner harbour of Port Pendennis Marina. Exciting day as we took Hannah over her first sil and through a swinging bridge.