Rough, later good.

Its been a rough week : first my car failed its MOT and cost nearly an uncool grand to sort out, i had been expecting the bill to be in the few hundreds as its that kind of age but as the work went on it needed more parts and more labour ! then at work i developed a horrible visual migraine…could hardly see out of one eye and that left me with a fuzzy head for a couple of days.    I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the 2 hour drive to the boat and that was predictably horrible too, even when i got down to Mylor the squalls were knocking the boat around on its mooring but it was set to improve so i got away from there as fast as i could.

First stop was channals creek until the ebb had stopped running out and then early on the ebb i sailed up past the king harry ferry and anchored just inside the true Fal river and waited for some rise of tide.    For those that don’t know the area the main river is actually the Truro river but there is also the Fal, the Tresilian, the St Mawes river and then several creeks so there are plenty of places to go hide away.  The Fal divides off the Truro just north of the ferry and where at the moment there are a couple of ships laid up on river moorings.

Tide times were such that i just had enough tide and daylight to move up the Fal and get around the first couple of bends which takes out all mechanical sound from the moored ships, in fact the 2 nights i spent there were just about the quietest nights i have ever had at anchor.   I took this picture at the first anchor spot first thing the next morning : almost completely still.

That night I did just about feel and hear the grate of the keels as the boat settled and then lifted again a couple of hours later.  It was such a different morning to what i have had so far : quiet with just lots of birdsong, no engine sound, no light pollution except maybe a single light way up the valley, nice too to see the trees just beginning to get some colour too which kind of reminded me of being at a woodland camp at this time of year as the first anchorage seems to be completely surrounded by woodland.

The truly great thing for me is that only very shallow draught boats like mine can get up there and any that do need to be able to take the bottom so that rules out most of the fin-keelers and motor boats.  Although most of it is mud i think i later found one bank down the centre which is sand….the banks and channels are complex, often not a single actual channel but usually a couple of thin ‘braids’ with a bank in-between them.  Again with the advantage of a rising tide i hauled anchor and mainly just let the boat drift up the river on the flood before anchoring again at the next major turn in the river.  I did then have a problem of what to do for the day : it was such a great spot that i just wanted to relax there for the day, maybe even beach the boat on some shingle in the corner of the bend and go for a walk. It was such a nice day though that i spent a couple of hours just sailing slowly back downriver and getting some film, then anchored for the rest of the day : i did seem to perk up a bit after that and as the tide finished running out i played around with paddling the boat just like a big canoe and slowly paddled back up the river on the flood again.  I have got lots of pictures and film to edit, as i get a chance i will try and splice together some film of the 2 days.