Portsmouth to Cardiff - Day 3

Morning broke grey and choppy after a lovely sunset the previous night. What with days being so much longer and the times that Siân and my shifts were, we were lucky enough to see sunset at 10pm and sunrise at 0430. Best of both worlds.  But yes today choppy and grey and finally rounding Lands End!   I’d been looking out for that for two days!

Only a couple more hours and we reach our destination, Cardiff. We need to be there at high tide as we need enough water to lock in. But as usual the unforeseen happens just when you least expect it!

Due to lack of wind in the correct direction and strong tides against us, we had to switch the engine on to buy time… but suddenly it started to over heat!  The inverter had decided to call it quits.   So in and upside down goes Conor, practicing his yoga, the engine being very large, tightly placed and tricky to get access to areas. Typically the inverter is in the very far corner at the bottom. After an hour and a half of some extremely calm and collected fiddling to refit a new inverter…the engine gets switched on….annnnd…..it’s still not working!  In the mean time we had slowly been drifting well off course and backwards, what with 15kn of wind in the wrong direction and 6kn of tide against us.. what could be done?  After 6 hours of working on the inverter, the boat is finally fixed, hooray! We’re on our way again… Cardiff here we come.  Unfortunately, the next thing to break was the water maker for the shower…

And so we finally entered the Bristol Channel. The Tide was finally with us but a strong head wind gusting up to 30kn is a challenging ride, not for our Lady but for the helmsman hanging on for dear life to keep her on her course. A great workout though!

We creep slowly towards our destination and the anticipation of a hot shower, warm meal and a good night’s sleep is all too welcome. 6 hours late we arrive with enough high water to enter through the lock into the calm Cardiff Bay.

With weary bones, we tied up at the Millennium Waterfront berth. We look forward to all the excitement of the Falcon Scott Centenary Celebrations.