27 June 2008

A few days, I thought, five days ago, and here we still are. Every few hours the coastguard issue new gale warnings and small craft warnings, so not only ourselves but also all the other yachts on this pontoon and most of the boats on the Royal Cork pontoons are waiting out the bad weather. A Dutch boat came in a few days ago, and we noticed it was registered in Hoorn. So I went and asked the skipper if he knew our friends Rob and Jose Martijn, who invited us to Hoorn two years ago to visit them. We met them on a stormbound pontoon in Lochinver in 2005, on their yacht Inish, and later combined our boat show trip to Amsterdam in 2006 with the Royal Highland Yacht Club with a short visit to Hoorn to see them. Amazingly the Dutch skipper here knew the boat, and knew Rob, in fact their boats neighbour each other on the pontoon in Hoorn! Small world. It got even smaller last night when Wietse, the friendly and helpful yard manager here, brought down the visitors' book for us to contribute an entry, and there we found an entry from 1997 from Rob and Jose in their previous boat! Another notable entry was signed by George Clooney, who had been here in a rather swish motor yacht, which Salve Marine had done repairs on!

Looking back on the last six weeks since we left, we were possibly a bit cavalier in taking the seemingly endless northerlies for granted. North wind is now rarer than hen's teeth here, and a procession of lows keep heading towards Ireland across the Atlantic from the south west. The strong south westerly winds have had an effect on the various races taking place at the moment - the Torbay Triangle race from Torquay to Kinsale to Treguier to Torquay had a dodgy second leg, apparently, and the Round Ireland race had to have its start postponed for a day. It finished yesterday.

Coincidence plays a big part in sailing, we are discovering. The other evening we noticed a yacht entering the Royal Cork marina, whose name rang a firm bell with both of us. It was the Aloha 2, which came to our rescue three years ago off Loch Harport on Skye, when our engine control got stuck in astern. They came back, because they had been ahead of us out of the loch, took up a tow, and towed us unstintingly in reasonably calm and relatively windless conditions, twenty miles towards Mallaig, where eventually the Mallaig Lifeboat came out and towed us into Mallaig harbour to find an engineer to repair the controls. When I released the tow line to Aloha 2 as the lifeboat arrived, I had tied a string bag to the end of the line, containing a bottle of Talisker, to express our thanks. We had after all just sailed from the home of Talisker itself!

So I leapt for the radio and called them up, reminded them of our connection, and got a positive response. They were busy preparing to go on to the pontoon so it wasn't a long conversation. But a day or so later a member of the crew came down to find us, and present the skipper's compliments. Last night we went along to the Royal Cork to try to get a better broadband signal, and there they were, in the bar, watching Roddick being beaten at Wimbledon. We had a very pleasant evening talking to Arthur, John and Seamus, over a few jars. Arthur still remembered the bottle of Talisker!

Our weather adviser tells us there is little likelihood of our starting the next phase of our journey in the next few days, so we have decided to take a short trip away from the boat. Daughter Cathy and son-in-law Duncan are keen Viking re-enactment fans, and they are involved in the Viking Festival this weekend at Bunratty Castle in County Limerick. So we are catching the noon bus to Cork, then a bus to Limerick, and finally the airport bus for Shannon as far as Bunratty, where we have booked a b&b for a night. We'll come back tomorrow. These Vikings seem to have got everywhere. Certainly for this event people are expected from all over Europe to stage a two-day festival in the grounds of the castle. They sleep in authentic tents on the site, and demonstrate various traditional skills like tablet weaving during the day. Anyway it's a nice opportunity to see Cathy and Duncan again, and catch up a little on family stuff.

I will put some photos of our walks round Crosshaven and our trip to Bunratty in the gallery, when broadband permits. Meantime, it's backpack packing time.