Leaving Dublin

Photos
[Kyle]The morning we left Malahide, we got up early so that we could head to FifteenBucks to get some much needed internet so that we could upload blog entries and download weather. To our horror, it turns out they don’t have wifi. We were told it was coming soon. Who has ever heard of a SixteenBucks without wifi? We were back on the street begging everybody we could find for wifi like homeless people looking for bus money. Eventually, we fetched up at a cafe that had a sticker on the door advertising it. The guy gave us one of those looks that made it clear that he didn’t like serving our kind and handed us a card with the code, good for 30 minutes. We tried to appease him by buying sandwiches but it had no effect. 30 minutes later, we were almost done. I went to the counter and begged for more. He looked at me like something he wanted to scrape off his shoe and then shoved a new card at me as if it were a knife. Whew! Ireland is supposed to be one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. For the life of us, we cannot figure out why wifi is so hard to find.

We got back to Footprint, cast off the lines and headed out with a fair current. The sky was clearing up and was mostly blue for a change. The wind was blowing off the land at about fifteen knots. This made the air warmer and the seas nice and flat. We flew up the coast under mainsail and screacher. Occasionally, the wind would increase at gaps in the land and we’d roll up the screacher and switch to full genoa until it was passed. Dark, heavy clouds formed over the land all day but we were in clearer air over the colder sea and we never got more than a brief sprinkle.

We crossed Dundalk Bay and turned in to Carlingford Lough just before the ebb switched to a flood. The timing for the entry had to be just right as the currents are so strong we would not have been able to make headway against it. The buoys at the entrance, instead of having the normal round shape, were actually perched on hulls shaped like skiffs so they could streamline in the current.

Carlingford Lough marks the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and it is just beautiful. The Lough is maybe two miles across. Each side rises up steadily, fjordlike, to the tops of 3000’ hills that were capped by clouds. The hills were covered by farms and forest until about halfway up, and then they gave way to rocky scrub. Having grown up in an area where the tree line is at about 12,000 feet, that, and the clouds gave the me feeling that the hills were much larger than they were.

We made our way to the anchorage at Carlingford town. The harbour dries out completely at low tide. In order to keep enough water under us, we had to anchor about a mile from shore.

The next morning, I had intended to get an early start and climb Carlingford Mountain but rain was slashing down from the direction of town so that ended up having virtually zero appeal. By the time it was around 11:00, the rain and the wind had left and we could see the town’s kids getting out their dinghies for a sail. We decided to follow suit and rigged the Portland Pudgy for the sail into the harbour. Carlingford is a charming three street village so it didn’t take us long to see all there was to see. I think we were both keen to hike a few of the nearby trails but the tide was falling and we were worried that the Pudgy would get stranded and we would have to portage through ¼ mile of mud. We had a quick cup of tea in a pub to escape a quick rain shower and then started the sail back. The wind had shifted and we were fighting both it and the current to get back to Footprint. We were barely making progress and at the rate we were going, it was going to take us a couple of hours to get back. No worries, we weren’t in a hurry. Before too long, clouds started rolling in over Carlingford Mountain and it began raining. It was awful, cold rain that collected on the sail and then ran onto us in steady streams. Enough of this, we decided, and broke down the sailing rig and started a mad row into it. It was wetter because of all the spray but at least it was over with faster. It was good to get back aboard Footprint and fire up the old heater.

Around Carlingford