Daydream has had crew since Milford Haven and with windy weather forecast this week wanted to push on to be able to get to somewhere on the UK mainland with a railway station by the end of the week for the crew to depart. They stayed one night at Port St Mary and set off early Sunday morning. We will regroup somewhere in Scotland.
A slightly more leisurely start to the day setting off at 07.45 from Port St Mary. We planned our start to be at the Calf of Man at slack water. We got there at our scheduled time but the narrow sound didn’t look very appealing so we opted for the slightly longer route around the island and Chicken Rock.
Just after Chicken Rock I found myself veering off in the wrong direction. My autopilot had failed. After checking the obvious, normal issue i sometimes get with the drive plug not seating properly i had to resort to lashing the tiller and digging out my spare old Autohelm 2000. I got that setup and running and i had steering again while i investigated the failure. Fortunately the breeze was light and against us to I could mess around with it at sea. There was voltage at the connecting socket, so found that the end unscrewed fairly easily and gave access to the motor. It appears that the motor has developed a dead spot. I tried cleaning it with WD40, all i had on board that was suitable. It made no difference. At that time I still had internet and a new drive was going to cost me £800. Ugh..
I continued on letting the old Autohelm do the steering. It’s not that easy to use as the control box mounts just above the cockpit floor near the engine controls. Soon the wind shifted a bit and I noticed Foreness sailing along nicely so out came the Genoa and off went the engine and we sailed all the way to just off the entrance of Ardglass harbour.
We arrived at the small friendly marina in Ardglass with plenty of space to moor up. We arrived and near low tide with just enough depth to slip in. As the tide began to rise more boats arrived filling the visitor berths.
Ardglass is a small friendly town or large village with a couple of shops and a few bars, but not a lot else to see, so I am trying to catch up on posts and photo uploading, but not having a lot of success as the marina WiFi is pretty unreliable and the EE network on my phone near non existent and completely non existent on my backup 3 network phone.
Im hoping to get this to send and try and get my non running tender outboard going again, before it rains.
Pictures are going to have to wait until i have a better signal.