Summer Again

OK - so this is close enough to summer right now, or the best we'll get we think
[Kyle] The next morning in Aberystwyth, it was Summer again. I was glad I waited. Now our pre-sailing checklist could be done in shorts. We left mid-morning at half-tide as it fell. Much later and we wouldn’t have been able to make it over the bar at the entrance.

I should have been more worried about getting off our dock. No sooner had we made the 180° turn away from the dock than we grounded on the drying grid next to the adjacent wall. A drying grid is a series of concrete slats with space between them to allow for drainage that boats rest on at low tide, like a big soap dish. We pulled up the rudders, but that didn’t free us. It urned out we had actually grounded the starboard hull. That was bad. On a catamaran, you just can’t hang out on the boom to get the keel up. With only one hull on the grid, and only part of one at that, we would have at the very least ended up at an alarming angle. At the worst, the small part of the hull supporting the weight might not be able to take the load and, well, our stay might have ended up being a lot longer than planned.

Luckily, we have a really shallow draft. Maryanne, no doubt drawing on our previous grounding experiences aboard Prydwen in Chesapeake Bay, lost no time in extending a boat hook and punting us off. If we could only teach her something to sing in Italian.

Well, that wasted more time than I would have liked, but we still managed to get over the bar and out into Cardigan Bay. It was cloudy everywhere inland, but the bay was a big, blue hole. It stayed that way for the entire day it took us to cross it. With the cockpit enclosure up to block the wind, I even managed to stubbornly stay in shorts the whole day.


Aberdaron bay
At the other end, right at sunset, we pulled into Aberdaron Bay at the end of the Llŷn peninsula. It was a bit exposed, but the current rushing by the mouth killed the waves, so it made for a nice, flat anchorage. Our first attempt at setting the anchor put us in too much weed, but the second one held. We had the whole bay to ourselves and just enough time for a glass of wine before bed.