6. Rocks and Islands

When does a rock become an island, who decides which?  The West of Ireland has so many examples of each.  There are rocks which have been lived on and islands which are uninhabited.  So many variations!

Leaving Crookhaven Rory was waiting outside the house on Rock Island to wave us off.  Our destination was Lawrence Cove marina on Bere Island in Bantry Bay, a 32 mile trip around Mizen Head and Sheep’s Head. With  a NW wind, force 4 gusting 5 we had a long starboard tack beat between Crookhaven and the Mizen, standing on out to sea until we could clear Sheep’s Head and make the Western entrance into Berehaven on port tack.  

With the wind between 15 and 19 knots it was a fast trip under full sail in bright sunshine but still quite chilly, needing to be well wrapped up.
We took sail off in the entrance to Berehaven as making 8 knots into a narrow channel was not a good move.  5 hours for the 32 mile passage was pretty good.  Lawrence Cove is at the East end of Bere Island and the marina is totally sheltered tucked in to the West corner of the Cove.  

Quite small and family run the marina had all the usual facilities although WiFi was a problem as they had problems with it on the marina.  Rachel, marina manager and running a family with 2 small children, was down on the pontoon to greet us and allowed us to go to their house and use their personal WiFi  to do some online banking.
Friday’s forecast was for light winds, generally from the North.  We opted to move on North and accept a day’s motor sailing rather than stay put and wait for the wind.  We opted to take the narrow passage through Dursey Sound between Dursey Island and the mainland rather than the longer passage outside the island and inside the Bull, Cow and Calf rocks, and they do look like the animals viewed from the North East.

 It was then a straight line leaving Scariff island to starboard and the  Skellings, Great Skelling, definitely an island, Little Skelling, could be an island or a rock and Lemon rock to port then Puffin Island and Valentia to starboard.  

The autopilot worked for its living on this trip!  Pods of dolphins played alongside us for quite a while, photographing them in action is very difficult.  We also saw our first puffins!

Just South of the Skellings we had a call from Maunie (see the earlier blog 1. Cruising to the West).  Graham and Dianne had managed to go back to Dartmouth after Falmouth and then overtaken us somewhere on the way to the West.  They had just come from Dingle.  We had a few minutes chat which made us decide to pay Dingle a visit after going into Valentia harbour, not least because Dingle has good free WiFi, we had been getting behind with the blog posts!
Rounding the western end of Valentia we could free off enough to sail and, with a freshening wind we turned the engine off and added a couple of knots to our boat speed with no engine noise! Off Knightstown a marina was under construction back in 2008.  The financial crisis hit Ireland hard and work was halted and has not restarted.  All that was built were two long floating wave breaks forming an L shape.  Plenty of space to tie up and walk ashore and no one seemed interested in taking any money!  We tied up astern of the Valentia lifeboat, a Severn class boat like our Torbay boat.

Going ashore to stretch our legs we ended up in Boston’s Bar.  David was persuaded to try a 7.1% strength beer (very pleasant it was to) and we ended up staying for a pizza, saving on cooking and washing up!  The evening finished off on board with cheese and biscuits and a wee glass of malt. 
A satisfying day, even though we motored all day we got ourselves another 46 miles northwards.