Last day of the cruise. Before leaving Falmouth, we refuelled the boat ready for next time, and motored up the Fal and Truro River to a pontoon mooring we had booked at Woodbury Point, near Malpas.
The Truro harbourmaster gave us the name of a waterman who would take us ashore at Malpas. The ferryman arrived, but he was on the bridge of one of the tripper boats that go up and down the river here, dwarfing the yachts. He squeezed his bow onto the end of the pontoon and we then showed off how fit a month’s sailing had made us by managing to scramble over the sides with our luggage. We disembarked at Malpas, taxi to Truro, then a self-drive hire car home.
In summary: We had almost four weeks cruising, logging 880 nautical miles, from Ardoran, near Oban, to Truro. If we include the commissioning cruise with David Fairhall in May the total comes to more than a thousand miles.
If one fact stands out, it is that we were extraordinarily lucky with the weather. After guessing at the planning stage that we would be held up by typical west of Ireland bad weather for at least a week on the cruise, we actually had only one forced day in port, and that was at Baltimore, after we had turned the corner onto the South coast.
What was best about it? The weather, for once looking like the pictures in the Irish Cruising Club pilot books, the company on board, the delightful places we visited, the friendliness (and absence of charges) in the harbours, the peace and quiet (seeing another yacht once or twice a day was an event) – all that made it one of the most memorable cruises.
tide by tide 