One of the down sides of this trip has been that whenever we have had to make a specific journey, we are at the mercy of the winds or lack of winds. In this case the fleet lucked out completely. Mustering in a lumpy windy sea off Bangor, we formed a line behind the rear commodore, Joey, and attempted to maintain a convoy speed of five knots as we headed up Belfast Lough to the marina in the centre of the city. Not a hard task, you might say, as it was not a lot over 9 miles, but the wind was strong and the tide was against us. If any of the boats had sailed the lovely line would have been broken - ironically this was a day when we could have sailed - but the line was broken as LIttle Else, number 8 in the flotilla of 10, was barely managing 3.5 knots, sometimes dumped by an oncoming wave as low as 1.9 knots. SO the three last boats steadily fell behind the other 7, one of which found it impossible to go that slowly, so was circling around the fleet keeping an eye on the rest. The joy of a Grand Banks with two powerful engines!

We reached the outer markers of the narrow channel just after the SUperfast ferry departed for the UK, and entered the very impressive docks area, keeping listening watch on channel 12 for the harbourmaster. When we got to the Abercorn HArbour marina, yachts were busy rafting up and we finally managed to do the same, sfter the foreseeable hazard of near-collisions with ten boats all trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Our instructions had been to dock, dress overall, grab a sandwich then head for the Titanic exhibition, wherre we had a block booking which started at a certain time. Because of the slow journey we were a bit tight on time so we forgot about the dressing overall and the sandwich and went to the exhibition, which was well done, if a bit wordy, but also had loads of pictures and a fun ride through a simulation of Harland and Wolf's shipyard in 1912.

AFter the exhibition I went back to the boat, dressed overall, and relaxed for a while until champagne and nibbles appeared on the pontoon, so we climbed over the two boats we were rafted up to and joined in. Excellent!

End of a hard but fun day.