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We are currently in sunny Falmouth after a pretty nice sail yesterday from Milford Haven. We left Milford Haven Marina through the sea lock on free flow at 06:00 after filling up with diesel, water and making the necessary coastguard and pier point (lock control) radio calls. As is getting the norm now, we left in rainy conditions, without any wind. Milford Haven was altogether a rainy sort of a place, we abandoned out dingy trip up the river esturies because it was raining, settling instead for a shopping/sight seeing trip to Haverford West (Wales).

The rain cleared about an hour out of Milford, and the wind perked up a bit too. All the way down to the Cornish Coast we were lucky with a series of showers which seemed to pass behind or in front of us from west to east, with only a few sprinkles on us. Night fall saw us in sight of Cornwall, we passed Lands End just before midnight. I tried to play the tides to get a double push. We were getting the expected tidal push from the ebb tide out of the Bristol Channel (being spring tides, we had about three knots of tide), and I expected the tide to turn at about 01:00, which would then give us a flood push around the end of Cornwall up the channel. Unfortunately, even though I tried to slow us down, the ebb tide scooted us past Lands End an hour and a half early, and then I got the flows out by about an hour anyway, so we then had about two and a half hours of tide against us before it slackened and again gave us a push.

We also faced the first of a series of showers to hit us and the effect of the gales which they have been experiencing during the Fastnet race - large swells, which hit us from behind, into the tide which also had the wind against it. This all combined to a very uncomfortable five hours of sailing/motoring/being shoved around until we finally rounded the Lizzard and had a more peacefull beam reach into Falmouth. We arrived three hours ahead of schedule none the less, and have slept/showered and lunched. The sun is shining again, Debanessa is quiet and the collection of technology, books, charts, wet weather gear, life jackets which seem to want to auto inflate are all back stowed where they should be.

I had a bit of fun on the VHF, relaying a message from lifeboat 1426 to Milford Haven coastguard after I heard them both calling each other, without success and I offered to act as a go between. As it turned out, the only message I was asked to relay was ask Milford Haven to switch to 2585 which I guess must be some MW or other frequency. We also listened in anguish at a EPIRB 125 call, followed by repeated and unsuccessfull calles to Yacht Rondo competing in the Fastnet Race. There was also a mayday call from a motor boat in Milford Haven who had lost steerage.

We did a tour of one of the Falmouth RNLI lifeboats this morning, and was surprised to see that they use the same Autohelm windex, depth/speed and GPS as Debanessa is equiped with.

I am not sure of the plan from here on, just that Southampton is only a few days away now, and that Debanessa could do with a good scrub down.

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