St Ives to Falmouth

Friday 26/07/08
I was awake at 04:00 and away before 05:00 in the dark. According to the almanac, a passage from the North to South around Lands End should use the close inshore counter-flows of tide, and this will involve running against the tide from St Ives to Lands End.
Sunrise.

We arrived outside The Brisons at about the right time, but seemed to have the tide against us all the way round.


I guess that we were not close enough to shore to catch the flow. Moving across Sennen Cove and inside Longships and outside Runnel Stone, the tide started to push us around.


At this point, we could decide to either stop at Newlyn or push on to Falmouth, and as it was still early in the morning we pushed across Mounts Bay towards Lizard Point.
The Lizard was surrounded by a thick bank of fog, but it was close inshore so we gave it some space as we rounded the Lizard.

The visibility was a couple of nm on the final run to Falmouth and as we approached we saw a huge amount of yachts and dingies - this was after seeing one or two at a time over the last week - we navigated our way through these and attempted to find a marina for a couple of days as Nick about to go home.