Departing Crosshaven

- July 21, 2019

Crosshaven from our B&B

We'd been in Crosshaven for a week. We'd cycled the Greenway, visited the Fort at Camden, taken a bus trip into Cork, done our laundry in Carrigaline, and made Cronin's our home away from home where we met up with OCC members from Persephone (David Ball & Trudie) and Aragorn (Robert & Caroline Jollye). We also made friends with Canadian single-hander Dirk from Footloose who will be joining OCC and Damian owner of a classic Fife yacht that he just inherited from his uncle and he's going to restore.

Our lead mechanic at CBY, Hugh Cassidy, is a fascinating character. He gave us a tour of his boat, a cruiser converted lovingly from a lifeboat. He reminded me of a cross between Hugh Laurie and Crocodile Dundee. We really liked him, and he was very good and trustworthy. The guys who work for him, Dennis who worked on our boat, are also terribly nice and good at their jobs. We had landed in the right place at Crosshaven Boat Yard. We stayed in the lovely Compass Rose B&B where Cathy took good care of us. The home was built as a hotel by a retired sea captain and she had grown up next door. Now it's being lovingly restored. It's full of nautical salvage material including a humongous dorade outside and loads of brass portholes.

We'd had a great visit to the home of our OCC PO Mike Hodder and his wonderful wife Carol not far from town. They are such special people. Mike became a farmer when he inherited a 400-yo estate that had been in the family since the beginning. Beautiful big Georgian House. He'd farmed dairy cattle first, then switched to beef when the price of milk tanked. Carol is an accomplished artist, self-taught. They, like Alex's family, had tried everything to make the farm work, taking in paying guests, farming snails, and contemplating various schemes. Alex and Mike have a lot in common. We all hit it off quite well. Their friends Dick and Susan Gibson came to dinner as well. We laughed throughout the night over a wonderful home-cooked Irish lamb feast.

But it was time to move on. Our engine was fixed, we'd taken on water, provisioned at the Centra, and paid up at the marina and B&B. The bill for the flexi plate fix was just over €2000 with the marina bill, more with the B&B. So just as Alex always says: BOAT stands for Break Out Another Thousand.

The forecast was for westerly wind force 5-6, increasing to 7 for a period. Aleria's used to that, but f course we were heading west from Crosshaven. When we pulled out of Cork Harbour, the wind was against tide and it was lumpy. Very lumpy. So we made the executive decision to go only as far as Kinsale. It's about 12-15 nm. The first few miles were brutal. Then the seas evened out a bit but we never raised the sails. We just powered into Kinsale.

A quick review of the visitor's docks revealed that they were full, so we dropped anchor across the channel, in toward the mooring field. We wondered why the mooring field was so far over to the other side. We soon found out. The fierce current that sweeps through the harbour (which I had learned about when trying to dock the last time we were here) reverses along the channel and spreads out toward the shores over the shallows. So we were at times anchored in the direction of the current and not the wind, at times across the wind, and fortunately, some of the time, with both current and wind. The wind was dying down through the night so it wasn't too bad. But usually, when something looks curious, there's a reason. The yachts on moorings were usually facing into the wind. Aha, the current is lesser over to the other side.

We saw that OCC boat Aragorn was in the marina but we never went ashore. We will be in Kinsale for the OCC annual Irish Dinner in October so there was no reason to go ashore. Plus the dinghy was deflated on deck so that would have been a hassle, especially since we planned a long day to follow. A nice dinner of chicken in a mushroom cream sauce made with the morels we bought in Cork was followed by an early night to bed.