To catch the tide it was a 3am start on Thursday morning. The wind was blowing from the southwest force 2 and it would have made a pleasant sail towards Port William only 40 miles away. However, with an army firing range spanning our route I wanted to be well across and out of the way before they were due to start firing at 8am!

Once I was confident I could get across the range I hosted the sails just after 6am. By 8am we had just cruised outside the range.

One thing to note is that on the Imray charts that I am using, the exact boundaries of firing ranges are not marked. On my chart the entire Irish Sea is a firing range! I marked the boundaries on by hand from the Admiralty Charts displayed in the toilet block in Whitehaven!

After a morning dominated by a need for speed Port William was only 12 miles off. The only problem is the you can only access that harbour around high water, which was 7 hours off (it was not even low tide yet!)

The next 6 hours consisted of how to sail Silverwind as slowly as possible (or at least at under 3 knots). This challenge was helped greatly when the spring tide turned against us. For a couple of hours we were surfing towards Port William at 7 knots but only moving forward by 3. As the tide faded and the wind increased I removed the main sail and sailed the last 4 miles under jib alone.

After successfully killing six hours we motored into Port William harbour in thick fog (which came down 5 minutes before) just after 2pm.

Port William is a mini harbour to say the least about half the size of Mousehole. We shared the outer harbour with 4 other boats with a further 10 small fishing boats in the inner harbour. For such a small place it did not lack the essentials. Within 2 minutes walk of the pier I was able to fuel up (possibly a record) and buy a newspaper!

Port William was going to be a bit unique in that I had arranged (or should I say it was luck) for Jenny a friend from sailing with Imperial College to meet up for a few days sailing in her native Scotland. Before she jumped on the train in Glasgow I confidently spoke of setting off early on the Friday morning tide. All this had changed by the time she made it to the harbour. I felt a little bad for inviting her when I had to break the news that the forecast had changed and it was force 6 or 7 for the next two days!