All the fun of the fair

What a day yesterday turned out to be. It started off nicely when we motored out of Howth, put the sails up and headed north. We even managed about an hour or so under the cruising chute, but then the wind died. It wasn't too bad, the sun was shining, and it was hot in the cockpit with no wind.

Then came the fog, with it the temperature dropped. Visibility came and went, but the wind never returned. The highlight of the day was a visit by a pigeon who came out of nowhere and tried to land on Pixie.



Unfortunately landing on Pixie proved a bit of a struggle, first it slipped off one of the spreaders, then went up to the mast head but had to share space with our mast head instruments which didn't go down well and in the end managed to land on the genoa sheet, before leaving, circling Pixie a few times before managing to land on a spreader. Clearly its perch of choice.

It stayed up there for four hours before leaving us to it.

Since we crossed to Ireland the engine hasn't quite been itself. Occasionally the engine would labour, before returning to normal revs. This was only happening every now and again, but over today it was happening several times a minute, and threatening to stop.

Not great when there was no wind, and fog. Because of the risk of fog I didn't want want to change the filter, so I contacted Nick Eales at Sea Start to see what he'd advise. He said reduce the revs, slow down so the engine wasn't needing so much fuel. If it did stop I might have to replace the filter, but the engine was still going.

While we were motoring slowly, it sounded like we caught something around the prop, but I couldn't see anything over the side so I put the engine in forwards, then reverse, then forwards again, and things seemed to improve.

Then the fog really came down, visibility was down to less than 1/2 a mile, we carried on towards Ardglass.



The engine kept going, but every time it laboured, I was expecting it to stop. And so when we got to within 0.4 miles from Adrglass we still couldn't see land, it wasn't until we were 1/4 of a mile from the harbour that we could make out the church spire shrouded in fog, and the dark shadow of rocks. Pixie is tooled up when it comes to electronics. It might seem like like overkill, but having the chartplotter, AIS, radar and active radar reflector, all of them earnt their place on board today. We reduced speed as we approached the harbour. As we enetered the short channel to the marina I put the engine in tickover, it carried on for a second or two before stopping. Kirsty re started the engine and if I took the engine out of gear I had to keep the revs up, before putting it in gear. It made maneouvering interesting, to say the least. Once in the berth I put the engine in neutral, and it promptly died. Once tied up I replaced the primary fuel filter, it took about 45 mins to replace and bleed the fuel system. With that finished I looked at the prop and could see some rope around it. Ten minutes with a boat hook over the side and I got it all off.



We were going to go to Bangor in Northern Ireland (not Wales) today, but after the trials of yesterday, we were too tired to get up at 5:30 to catch the tide, so we're having the day off in Ardglass.