Helford River – tide by tide

Homeward bound – Helford

After four holidays in or near Helford and many visits on past cruises over the last 40 years, it was a nostalgic return to the river. Here are some pictures of a two day mini-break there before we went on to Plymouth.

We inflated the dinghy, quite hard work with the bigger, tougher one we bought specially for Scotland, and went ashore first on the Helford village side of the river. There’s a visitor pontoon, not cheap at £5 a day for a dinghy.

*Helford Passage, across the river from Helford. There’s a thousand-year-old ferry service between them.*

*The Helford River Sailing Club has an excellent dining room, bar and terrace with a view to Helford Passage. They welcome visiting yacht crews, so we had drinks and dinner there.*

*Tony in Bosahan Cove, where I had a delightful swim in water that the boat’s instruments said was 22 degrees. The Cove is on the recently finished King Charles National Coast Path*

*The path up to Bosahan starts by the boathouse*

*A good use for a redundant chapel – now a café*

*We followed the coast path round Dennis Head to St Anthony-in-Meneage, in Gillan Harbour, then walked back to Helford by another route for dinner.*

*Spring Fever is the third boat out, photographed next day as we walked the coast path on the other shore to the National Trust gardens at Durgan*. *The weather looks perfect but there were Force 6 gusts. So we took the water taxi – also the ferry, which picks up from boats – to avoid being soaked in dinghy spray.*

*The Durgan gardens are in a steep wooded valley which gives them a sub-tropical climate*

*The maze, one of the biggest and most complicated in England, full of lost children having a good time*

*The beach hamlet of Durgan, with a shop selling ice creams.*

Helford Passage, where we stopped at the pub for pints of cold Guinness Zero.

There was one old treat missing: the famous oyster fishery on Porth Navas Creek has closed. We used to go up the creek in the dinghy to buy oysters and mussels.

The ferryman said there was an attempt to rescue it which failed, but not before they had introduced Pacific oysters to replace the precious native variety. Pacifics are now growing wild up and down the river.

The ferryman said scathingly that the fishery had been restarted by a Londoner, which he made very clear he thought explained the whole failure. I felt compelled to confess to being one!

Homeward bound – Milford Haven to Helford

We intended to sail 115 nautical miles from Milford Haven to the fishing harbour of Newlyn in St Michael’s Bay, Cornwall. The weather was so good when we rounded Lands End that we changed our minds, and went another 25 miles to the much more attractive Helford River, near Falmouth.

Slight seas and warm, gentle winds make for good off-watch sleep down below, and the two us were feeling fine as dawn rose approaching Lands End. So we went on to round the next big headland, the Lizard, and turned up the coast to pass the notorious Manacles reef on the approach to Falmouth.

*The sun sets on the approaches to the Bristol Channel….*

… *and rises as we pass the Longships lighthouse near Lands End.*

*The visitor centre at Lands End in dawn light*

*The Lizard lighthouse, peaceful now but, like Lands End and Cape Cornwall*, *bad weather and strong tides can make it ferocious*

*Bosahan Cove, near the entrance to Helford River*

The village of Helford

We were going to anchor, but valuable attempts to protect seagrass beds have closed off much of the area we used on previous visits. So we picked up a visitor buoy nicely placed between the village of Helford on one side of the estuary and Helford Passage on the other, ready for a good rest.

July – passage to Ireland

The plan before Covid struck was to allow three weeks for a cruise to the Irish Sea, which is quite difficult to time exactly because of the uncertainties involved in rounding Lands End.

To make the new cruise work on our original pre-Covid timescale, Tony and I had taken advantage of a generous offer from Antony F to arrange a mooring for us at Saltash Sailing Club, an attractive and friendly place near the Tamar bridges (see June post).

*Dolphins all the way from Plymouth to Helford – here’s one about to surface*

A good wind to get to Lands End from Plymouth is often a bad wind for carrying on northwards to Ireland. Strong winds can also prevent rounding the headland for days, as we found in 2007 when we were held up for a week in Falmouth.