CRUISING IN IRELAND

Written by Louis Del Guercio, Dolce

My wife Carolyn and I were half way through the final leg of our first transatlantic crossing when we had to make a decision: where to make landfall.  We had been thinking about the Isles of Scilly, in the southeast of England, more for their whimsical name than anything else.  But our Salty Dawg friend Tim Zimmermann was lobbying for us to come further north to the southeast coast of Ireland, where had he inherited a house in the town of Glendore.  Tim promised that if we came he’d buy us a pint (of beer, we assumed).  How could we resist?

A few days later we arrived in the tiny coastal village of Crookhaven, Ireland, excited at having completed this bucket-list trip, and glad to be back in protected waters.  King Neptune had arranged a special reception for us with some of Ireland’s best weather.  We arrived on a late Friday afternoon in early July.  The winds blew gently, the temperature was in the mid 70s and the sky was clear and sunny.  Very unusual for Ireland.  As a result, Crookhaven was hopping.  Sullivan’s Pub, located about 100 feet from the harbor, was crowded with people, all Irish, as this village is too remote to be popular with tourists.  Kids and a few adults were jumping off the pier into the chilly water.  And even though it was already 7 p.m. the sun was still high and warm as we’re at 51 degrees north latitude.

Crookhaven is located on a deep protected harbor and offers a half dozen moorings, free for visiting boats.  In addition to Sullivan’s Pub the town has an excellent restaurant called Nottage, where we had an unforgettable Crab Lasagna and a fish dish made with John Dory, a type of fish we’d never heard of but is a favorite among the Irish, and for good reason.

The next day we took a long walk up the coast and discovered the area has some world-class beaches.  Of particular note is Barley Cove Beach, which is a 1/3 mile crescent with white sand and a unique floating walkway that takes you to the beach from the parking lot.  This is a popular holiday spot for locals and being an unusually warm and sunny weekend in July they were out in force, and yet the beach is so large it didn’t seem crowded at all.

At the western end of Crookhaven Harbor the water gets shallow and with eight foot tides it dries out to a flat sandy beach, perfect for beaching our catamaran and cleaning the bottom.  When the waters returned we motored into deeper water and dropped the hook as there was heavy weather coming.  One of our engines had developed an airlock in its cooling system when we dried out and so we were down to one engine, which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but we were about to be proven wrong. 

The wind began to howl during the night and by daybreak it was blowing in the mid 30s.  The town mooring field was about a quarter mile down wind of us, but the anchor was holding firm.  We have a 25 kg Excel anchor and it has always proven very reliable.  We were lounging in our comfy saloon enjoying breakfast when suddenly our anchor alarm sounded.  Now we were headed toward the crowded mooring field at a frightening pace.  Carolyn, still in her PJs, headed for the foredeck in the cold, wind and rain.  Meanwhile, I started the port engine but not the starboard, as I remembered from the night before that it had an airlock.  It’s great to have the redundancy of two engines on a catamaran, but with only one working, maneuverability is limited and we were now deep into the mooring field with boats just feet away on all sides.  As I did my best to keep us away from the other boats as the gusts shoved our bow from one side to the other, Carolyn struggled to get the anchor up as the bottom is blanketed with thick kelp, which was now wrapped around our anchor rode and snubber.

After what seemed like hours, Carolyn managed to get the anchor up and I managed to avoid all the other boats and maneuver our boat out of the mooring field.  We re-anchored, this time further away from the moorings, and let out a sigh of relief.  A little while later I started the starboard engine to try and fix the air lock and discovered that it had resolved itself. 

Dublin

After a wonderful five days in Crookhaven we were starting to get a little bored and so it was time to move on.  We motored a few hours east to the town of Baltimore, where we had a free mooring for as long as we liked, compliments of a friendly local we had met in Crookhaven.  We decided to take the opportunity to leave our boat for a few days and visit Dublin.

Ireland is a pretty small country but it’s hard to get anywhere quickly.  From Baltimore we had to take two buses and a train to get to Dublin, which took us six hours.  Nevertheless it was interesting to travel through the Irish countryside and mingle with the locals on public transportation. 

We arrived in Dublin on a Friday and the place was jam packed.  We hadn’t realized there was a national hurling championship being held in town and all the hotels, pubs and restaurants were filled to capacity.  We couldn’t even get a train back to Baltimore, we had to wait an extra day.  For those of you who’ve never heard of hurling—we hadn’t—it’s a bit like field hockey played with a similar hooked stick called a “hurley.”  Players run while balancing the ball, called a “silotar,” on their hurley and are allowed to pick up the silotar and hit it.  The Irish are crazy for the game, which is 3,000 years old.

While in Dublin we listened to traditional fiddle music in a pub, and had a few excellent dinners out.  We visited the Dublin Zoo, which is very well done with most of the animals in large naturalistic enclosures.  We also liked the animatronic life-size dinosaurs scattered throughout and the explanations about how evolutionary pressures resulted in dinosaurs and modern animals with similar features, think Brachiosaurus vs giraffe or Triceratops vs rhinoceros. 

One of the highlight of our trip to Dublin was a visit to the nearby town of Sandycove to see the James Joyce museum.  Joyce wrote only three novels and spent the majority of his life outside of Ireland, but he is the closest thing to an Irish God: his name and likeness are everywhere.  The museum is located in a tower overlooking the Irish Sea.  Joyce only spent a week there while on holiday but its where his most famous novel Ulysses begins.  The tower is also next to a popular swimming spot featured in the popular television series Bad Sisters.

Visiting with fellow Salty Dawgs

After returning to the boat we headed to the town of Glendore, a few hours further east, where fellow Salty Dawg Tim Zimmermann has his  home.  Carolyn and I took some excellent hikes around the countryside.  (The app AllTrails is excellent for finding good hikes.)  Curiously, at one point we ran into a herd of alpacas swimming at a beach.  Turns out a local couple runs a small company that charges tourists to take their alpacas for a walk to the beach.

Tim also invited us to an evening beach picnic and bonfire with family and Irish friends, which was great fun.  The Irish as you may have heard are very friendly and we really felt welcomed.

After a couple of wonderful weeks in southern Ireland we needed to quicken the pace north if we were to make it to northern Scotland by mid August, as was our goal.  But the question was whether to go up the west or east coasts of Ireland.  The west side is the wilder and more scenic route, but it is subject to stronger winds and rougher conditions and we knew that we could be pinned down for days by strong storms.  We decided to take the east route.

We stopped in the harbor of Kinsale, which has an excellent marina, and visited Charles Fort, which is well preserved with excellent historic tours.  Next we stopped for the night in the fishing village of Kilmore.  Ireland has lots of good marinas, which are generally significantly cheaper than the United States, usually $40 to $60/night for a slip and $20/night for a mooring.  When cruising in the US we generally anchor, but while traveling in Ireland and the UK we found the marinas to be cheap enough and so convenient that we used them about half the time.

Next we pulled into Dun Loaghaire, pronounced Done Laurie, which has a large modern marina, and I’d say one of the best marinas we’ve ever been to.  In retrospect, we should have probably not taken the long trip to Dublin from down south but come here to visit Dublin instead since its only a 30 minute train ride into town.  One evening while we were having an excellent meal at an Italian restaurant in Dun Loaghaire, a local befriended us and insisted he bring us back to his home for tea and to meet his wife.  The Irish are so friendly.

After a couple of days we continued north to the town of Carlingford.  We anchored just outside the marina and in a short while the marina owner showed up in a skiff.  We thought he probably wanted us to move or something, but instead he invited us to a floating concert being held that evening not far away.  The Irish are so friendly.  Later that evening, about a dozen boats, mostly from the marina, moved to a little harbor nearby where a few locals played music on one boat while the other boats anchored nearby and listened to the concert.  It was a magical experience.

While we were there, the locals told us that Carlingford is on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  After the Irish peace treaty signed in 1998 tempers have settled down here.  But they did say that recently one of their boats had travelled north flying their Irish flag.  Some locals confronted them and demanded they take down their Irish Flag.  They refused and so they were badly beaten and their boat burned.  I guess the Irish aren’t always so friendly.  The harbormaster assured us that we would have no problems. 

Our last day in Ireland

We had wanted to visit Belfast and see the Titanic Museum, which is housed at the facility that built the Titanic, (not the best advertisement for a shipyard) but our time was running short and bad weather was coming and so we decided to head straight to Scotland.  We spent our last night in Ireland in the Bangor Marina, which is on the southern edge of the loch that leads to Belfast.  (The Irish and British call a lot of things “lochs” including bays, harbors and rivers.)  After a quiet night we made the short 12 nm hop across the North Channel to Scotland to start the next stage of our adventure. 

We loved Ireland.  The country is spectacular with many places to take beautiful hikes and lots of places to anchor or find an inexpensive marina.  The people couldn’t be friendlier and almost everyone knows someone who has emigrated to the United States.  The weather tends to be cool and cloudy with some rain almost every day, which makes the warm sunny days even more precious and what makes Ireland so green.  The west coast is said to be even prettier than the east so maybe we’ll do that on the way south to Portugal where we plan to keep our boat for the winter.

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