Aleria's Adventures

We have been invited on several occasions to deliver lectures based on our books. Our anchoring book was actually born from a lecture. When people wanted to buy our book after the talk, we said, "What book?" That's when we set out to write Happy Hooking .

We were invited by Manchester Cruising Association to deliver our talk on Cruising the Wild Atlantic Way of Ireland.  We were met at the airport by Roy Conchie, Commodore, and dropped off at the Brittania Ashley Hotel in Hale, Cheshire.  He and his delightful wife Susie took us to dinner later and made sure we were settled with our plans for the day.  Roy was a very accomplished photographer in another life. Susie an accomplished accountant. They were just back from Barbados.

We've been invited to present our talk on Cruising the Wild Atlantic Way of Ireland in Manchester on Thursday of this week.  More information is on the Manchester Cruising Association web page. We look forward to seeing you there.

Benbulben in Sligo On Tuesday of this week, November 1, Alex and I drove to Killybegs to offload Aleria 's sails, cushions and other stuff. We brought a trailer along this time and loaded the car and trailer full. It only took 2.5 hours to drive up ... into blistering sunshine the whole way.  We were very efficient this year and got almost everything done in 2.5 hours.  A quick lunch break on deck, and we were on our way home ... into blistering sunshine the whole way.

It was a lovely morning and we were soon underway, thinking we might stop in to Inishmurray if the forecast for a calm day proved true. At this point, it was not. Once again we were soaring up the North Mayo coast in a SE. Then we realized it was almost 70 miles to Killybegs. That's a long day. We'd have to go straight there. We passed inside the Stags on a perfect course heading for Teelin doing more than 9 knots with the current; we couldn't make Killybegs on our current heading as the wind had backed to ESE and we were hard on the wind, trimming sails to the shifts as if in a dinghy. The chop was surprisingly uncomfortable out there. It was going to be a long trip bashing into the waves  on a beat all day.

We had a fine weather window that coincided with the astronomically high spring tide. If we left with the tide on Tuesday afternoon, we could sail to the Inishkeas or Black Sod Bay the next morning, spend the night there, then continue on to Killybegs Thursday and haul out on Friday. Unusually, there was a high centred over Scandinavia just above us that was extending all the way down to us. We were to have light southeasterlies and clear skies after strong easterly winds on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a succession of lows plunged across below to Spain and a slow-moving hurricane Matthew was plaguing the US East Coast.

Connected below deck during a gale On our voyage to Spain this summer, one of the things I was really looking forward to was disconnecting from the digital world for a period of time. There are two places where one can still disconnect: under the sea and in the middle of it. We'd be out of range of mobile signal, and therefore internet access, for days at a time since we sold our SAT phone. When crossing the Bay of Biscay, we could be unplugged for 4 days.