Hunkered Down in the Helford River

 I'm sitting in the sheltered area of Idril's cockpit, just forward of the companionway, tapping on my laptop, surrounded by bright sunshine (750 watts off the solar panels!), lots of other boats -- and a 35 knot breeze, gusting higher. Our expected two nights on the Helford River is about to turn into four, courtesy of some gale-force winds that are keeping us --- and clearly a number of other boats -- safely attached to our moorings. 

 

We got here on Saturday afternoon, having finally left Mylor Yacht Harbor, near Falmouth, with a completely functional electrical system. Now we can stay out of marinas and still be able to cook on our induction stove without being plugged into shore power, courtesy of our 48V battery bank, solar panels, Integrel generator and inverter. 

 

 

We followed another sailboat into the Helford River, and it turned out to be the Malo 40 sailed by Suzie and John, a couple we met while still in Mylor.  They took some pictures of Idril under sail, the first really good ones we have.

 

 

We sailed over with two reefs in the mainsail and using the staysail (the smaller of our two foresails), and the boat handled beautifully -- very little rudder pressure and not a lot of heeling.

Katy made a delicious dinner, which we ate in proper style in the cockpit before sunset.

 

On Sunday morning we inflated our collapsible, two-person kayak for the first time and paddled up Frenchman's Creek. 

I don't have any pictures, as I didn't bring my phone, but Katy took some, and once they are uploaded I will add a few to the album.

We then beached the kayak at Helford Point and took a long walk out to St. Anthony-in-Meneage, a small village near the tip of the western side of the Helford.

Upon return, the tide had gone out -- which really means something here. We had to schlep the kayak several hundred yards before we found water. While crossing a rocky area Katy was able to harvest a meal's worth of mussels, which we cooked and ate Sunday evening.

On Monday we kayaked to the eastern shore, beached the kayak and walked up to the rather stunningly gorgeous Trebah Garden. Our meandering route will give you some idea how much we enjoyed this place.

 

There's just no way to capture the beauty of this place, but I did try.

Trebah was one of many departure points for the D-Day invasion, and this modest  memorial commemorates that.

 

 

 

On the way back to the kayak we were amused by this car's license plate.

 

We returned to the boat, warmed up leftovers for dinner and settled in for an only slightly-planned third night.

The wind came up shortly after we got back to the boat, and it howled all night. Neither of us slept very well; we weren't entirely happy with how we had rigged our mooring lines, and there were some ominous creaking sounds that seemed to whisper, "You haven't set these lines very well, have you?"

In the morning we spend most of an hour rejiggering our lines, deploying our beefy anchor bridle to replace the dock lines we had originally used, and trying to decide if we had enough swing room to avoid the boat behind us. Katy looked at several weather forecasts, and we concluded that trying to leave today for Mylor was just not very wise. So - we'll stay another night.

More pictures here.

St. Anthony Head, and getting set to leave Mylor

We got some nice weather on Saturday and decided to take a day off from boat work to walk around St. Anthony Head, the set of bluffs on the southeast side of the entrance to the River Fal, the Roseland Peninsula. Getting there involved riding our bikes around to Flushing, parking them, and then taking three ferries: Flushing to Falmouth, Falmouth to St. Mawes, and St. Mawes to Place. 

As the last of those ferries approached the landing at the oddly-named "Place", we were treated to a nice view of Place House. It's, er, quite the Place.

 

Walking along the path towards the St. Anthony lighthouse, we passed St. Anthony's Church. It's small, but quite lovely. Katy took this at the intersection of the cruciform arms.

Continuing along the path, we passed this beach, a popular boating destination.

Lighthouse access is closed due to COVID-19, so this is about as close as we got.

The path runs very close to the edge of the bluffs at some places.

It also passes through pastures occupied by wild ponies.

There is also some nice foraging to be done. Mmmmmm...

The first part of the path, out to the lighthouse, has some shade, but further along it was very exposed and sun-blasted, so after getting far enough out to see some of the coves, we turned back.

All the pictures from the walk can be seen here.

That was Saturday. Sunday we did some plumbing work: reinstalling a filter that we had to get out of the way for the battery installation, and preparation to install a bidet faucet in the aft bathroom.

But today, Monday, was a biggie for us. Triskel Marine, the company that has been installing our snazzy new power system, came out and rebalanced our lithium battery banks, installed some fuses that were missed in the initial installation, and gave us the green light to start testing the system.

We cooked dinner on battery power for the first time tonight. We'll stay off shore power through tomorrow, then recharge on shore power tomorrow night, cycling the system through a full test cycle. If all goes well, and the weather cooperates, we plan to leave for the Isles of Scilly on Thursday, and some true cruising.

Visiting Trelissick

We are off the boat again, and staying a lovely Airbnb in Falmouth while Triskel Marine installs the Integrel system in Idril. The work seems to be progressing well; here's a picture of half of the new 48V battery bank, installed in the starboard well just forward of the companionway. The main Integrel controller is also visible.

Meanwhile, Katy and I are exploring the area around Falmouth, on foot, bicycle and ferryboat. The Airbnb we are in has a lovely view of the harbor from its patio, and is an easy walk to the downtown and dockyard areas of Falmouth.

Today we took an early morning train out to Perranwell and then biked to Trelissick, a National Trust location.

The short bike ride from the train took us mostly on lightly-used country and village roads, and past this repurposed call box.

The gardens at Trelissick are just amazing. It occurred to me as we walked among the trees that arborists must think in terms of decades, if not centuries.

After a pleasant hour or so wandering around Trelissick, we got back on the bikes and headed to St. Just-in-Roseland, home of a lovely church and surrounding grounds. To get there we had to cross the River Fal (from whence Fal-mouth) at the King Harry Ferry. It's an interesting ferry, in that it moves across the river on chains.

It was easy to know when we had arrived at the church.

The church is beautiful (and homey!), as are the  surrounding grounds.

The main walkway down to the churchyard is lined with stones carved with mostly biblical passages, but a few other wonderful sayings, too.

The harbor at St. Just-in-Roseland certainly does dry out.

The trip back to Falmouth (via St. Mawes, and another ferry ride) gave us more views of the Falmouth harbor.

We got back in the mid-afternoon. Tomorrow morning we will move back to the boat; hopefully all the work will be done, and we will finally be able to start really sailing.

To see all the pictures we took, visit this album.

Hey, we seem to be living aboard!

Idril is currently alongside the east pontoon at Mylor Yacht Harbor in Cornwall, U.K. Tomorrow morning the folks from Triskel Marine will come aboard to start installing our new "Integrel" electrical system. We arrived a week ago, and have been busy preparing the boat for the Integrel and learning how to live aboard. We've also been recovering from the trip over from France and spending more time resting than usual.

Our trip here was our first outing without guidance from Kevin Bray, the Swiftsure Yachts representative in France, and the "handover agent" in Cherbourg. Kevin did an outstanding job helping us find and resolve the inevitable new boat glitches, and did a great job teaching us to handle the boat. But now it was time for us to leave familiar Cherbourg behind and start sailing.

We left Cherbourg about 10 days ago, on a typical (for Normandie) partly cloudy Friday afternoon. We left the Cherbourg Rade and sailed west, passing the northwestern tip of the Cherbourg peninsula, and then turned south to sail though the Alderney Race.

We timed our arrival at the Race for close to slack tide, but it was still pretty exciting. The sea floor under the Race is full of underwater mountains, so there are dramatic upwellings, strong currents and many overfalls. Occasionally the boat would just slide sideways, and keeping a heading was a challenge.

At the southern end of the Race we turned northwest and headed for the English Channel. The wind was unfortunately against us, and with the increasing wave heights as we left sheltered waters, we were soon both seasick. Scopolamine patches helped, but neither of us felt really 100% until we reached calmer waters near Plymouth on Saturday afternoon.

We had planned to make a nighttime crossing of the shipping lanes, but we still don't have an AIS transmitter, and our receive-only AIS showed us some very crowded waters. With neither of us feeling great, we decided to turn back to the southwest and attempt the crossing during daylight hours, which we did on Saturday morning.

Once past the shipping lanes we decided to make for Plymouth, rather than press on to Falmouth. There was no chance that we'd arrive at Falmouth before dark, and we both needed some rest. So, Plymouth it was. We spent the night at Mayflower Marina.

After a good nights sleep we set out for Falmouth around midmorning. 

We were still fighting our way upwind, and finally we arrived at Mylor Yacht Harbor at dusk on Sunday evening.  The entrance to the harbor is guarded by a huge mooring field, and finding our way in to the dock was tricky. We had to "parallel park" the boat (as we had at Plymouth) between a set of pontoons, with boats in every slip on either side. The bow thruster was a big help, and we were lucky to have very light winds as we arrived.

The next morning we moved from our temporary spot on the dock to a nice, wide slip, where we stayed for the next 5 days. 

On Monday morning we confronted our first boat problem since leaving Cherbourg: our fresh water pump failed. Luckily we could still get fresh water at the galley sink with the foot pump, but only cold water. On Tuesday morning we took the pump out and replaced it with our spare (boy, are we happy we had THAT spare!).

It was easier than we anticipated, and I was pleased that we were able to handle our first post-delivery mechanical failure on our own.

On Tuesday evening we had a visit from Triskel Marine, in preparation for the installation of our fancy electrical system. Its major pieces are:

• four 5KWh lithium batteries
• a high-output DC generator, mounted on our Volvo Penta D2-75F propulsion engine
• a kilowatt of solar panels on our stern arch (already there, but not hooked up)
• a 5KW DC to AC inverter, which takes power from the batteries and produces the 220VAC power needed by our watermaker and kitchen appliances (an induction stove, microwave/convection oven, hot water kettle and the all important milk frother...)

We're very eager to have this system installed, because without it, we're not able to anchor out or take moorings, making us dependent on slips and shore power. 

The batteries were dropped off on Friday afternoon, and we stowed them temporarily in our aft cabin.

The plan is to install two on each side of boat, beneath the floor plates on either side of the companionway. To make this work on the port side, we had to move some water filters inboard to clear out some space. We did that this morning. This was another confidence builder; neither of us had worked with the 15mm PEX tubing and associated fittings before this. It turns out that this kind of plumbing is very easy. Thank you, John Guest Company, for making some very easy-to-use fittings!

So - what's it like to be living aboard? For starters, everything takes a little longer than you might expect. Everything on the boat has to be stored such that it won't just go flying every time the boat heels from side to side, or bounces up and down on the waves. This means that all of our kitchen gear -- pots and pans, utensils, dishes, and of course food --  has to be stowed with little room to move around, making it tricky to get out. 

Here's a view of our galley, looking from front to back. Notice the cabinets at the back of the counter.

Here's what the contents are like, up close.

To get the large dinner plates out I have to first pull out the smaller plates on top of them; there just isn't enough height to get my hand in there with both sets of plates at the same time.

A lot of our storage is also beneath floor panels, so to get at it, you have to lift a floor panel, get what you need, and replace the panel.

It's not really hard, and you get used to it quickly, but it does slow things down.

Some truly critical pieces of equipment, however, remain at our fingertips.

It's also important to keep the boat tidy - "A place for everything, and everything in its place." It's just not OK to let dishes pile up in the sink; they have to be washed immediately, dried, and put away. Our galley sink is smaller than most terrestrial kitchen sinks, so we typically do dishes as we cook. Meal prep is an all-hands affair (especially since there are only the two of us aboard). But we'd kind of gotten accustomed to that while in Cherbourg; typically Katy does the actual cooking, and I wash and chop vegetables, make a salad and dressing, and do the intermediate clean-up.

All of this is becoming second nature, and since we don't generally have any place we have to be at any particular time, it doesn't seem onerous.

We are currently tending to sleep until fairly late in the morning (8 or 9) and, being so far north, don't go to bed until 11 or midnight, since it stays light quite late.

I'm spending a lot of time just crawling all over the boat, figuring out how things are put together and making a lot of notes. I'm working on creating a "boat owners manual" with lots of pictures and detailed instructions on how to operate the boat; the manual we got from Garcia was surprisingly generic. I also try to get out for bike rides at least 3 days a week. My rides sometimes bear delicious fruit.

All of this is about to be disrupted, though. Starting tomorrow morning, Triskel will start installing the Integrel, and we'll be off the boat and back in an Airbnb for 5 days. I'm looking forward to having the boat well and truly finished, so we can really settle in and make Idril our home.