by J Abrams

Eolet’s cruising this year gave us a view of the varied aspects of the Irish Sea coast from Walney Island to Anglesey. A description of it may serve as an introduction to the area.

At our home port of Heswall, on the Dee, encroaching marshes have now reached the mud banks on either side of the gutter. It has the appearance of an Essex creek, but is very much shallower. At low tide the water virtually disappears from the Wirral side of the estuary. One and a half hours before high tide it can be seen on the horizon, and soon a small tidal wave rushes up the gutter. For three and a half hours we look across an unbroken sheet of water to the Welsh hills but we can no longer sail there directly across the banks.

On the 26th May the tides were neaps, and unusually small. At 1940, high tide, Tony, Jan (aged nine) and I were struggling to push Eolet into water deep enough to float her at her moorings. She draws fifteen inches and is a heavy, beamy old boat. Tony hauled on the mooring chain, Jan shoved with an oar, and I heaved against the transom from the water. At last, to our relief, she floated. The wind was S. to S.E., fair but light. We used the outboard as well as sails to make sure of beating the ebb out of the gutter. A complete double rainbow made a semicircle spanning the estuary behind us. We anchored that night at Hilbre, the red sandstone islet at the mouth of the Dee which can be reached on foot over the firm sands from West Kirby at low tide. It is a quiet anchorage, where one is usually alone with a couple of moored boats after the day-time visitors have gone. There is no protection from northerly winds, however.

Next morning there was a fine south-easterly breeze, fair for our trip to Morecambe Bay. We set off northwards down the Swash and over the tail of the East Hoyle Bank to the Horse buoy. Our first hazard, in fact the chief worry of the day, was crossing the Mersey shipping lane. With a fair wind this was simplified, and we crossed Queens Channel just downstream of the training revetments at 0900 hrs. It is only half a mile wide, but the procession of liners, tankers and freighters makes one feel like a pedestrian on a motorway, this is why we seldom visit the Mersey, though there is a shallow channel, the Rock Channel, connecting the Wirral shore with the Mersey at New Brighton, and also connecting with the gutter where the Hoylake moorings are. As usual in this part of the world, these channels dry out, but this leaves them free from commercial shippings.

North of the Mersey the banks stretch far out from the Lancashire coast. Luckily with an easterly wind, we had no need to fear being set onto them. Our course for the entrance to Lancaster Sound was N by E true. We lost sight of Formby Point and gave a wide berth to the sands of the Ribble, lost to sight on the misty horizon. We passed close to the Nelson L.V. which marks the Ribble entrance, and saw a tanker waiting for water there. The next land we saw after the Ainsdale sandhills was St. Anne’s, on the northern side of the estuary. From this point we could see Blackpool Tower and the low shoreline stretching between, on which we were now converging. Our progress was very fast, with a force four wind and a flat sea, but threatened thunder squalls caught up with us off Blackpool. Faster and faster we sailed, but it was asking for trouble to hang on to full sail. In reefing and re-hoisting the mainsail I tore it: the big mistake of the season was my decision to make the sails do one more year. As the squall passed and the wind became light the jib was no longer enough, so we started the outboard. Round the corner into Lancaster Sound we plodded, across the wind now, and here another squall flogged at the jib and tore it before I could get it in. We might have anchored and mended the sails while the squall passed, but having the engine we made good use of it. Completely blinded by torrential rain, I had to guess at the leeway we were making; eventually we found the edge of Sunderland Shoulder, the sands on the northern side of the Lune channel. We kept along this until we could see Abbey Light at the entrance to the Lune by Sunderland Point. At 1830 we passed the village of Sunderland with its group of trees and were swept by the tide up to Glasson, where Howard and Barbara Gordon had come to meet us.

Glasson (handy for the M6) is a good place for a mooring in the Morecambe Bay area. The winding Lune is a much more sheltered place than the Dee, and Eolet stayed there on her anchor for two months, close to the drying moorings of the Glasson Sailing Club, which made us welcome. We sometimes sailed up river between marshy shores to the pub near Lancaster known as Snatchems. Within three hours of high water one may cross the bar out into Morecambe Bay, with its sands and its shallow estuaries. We did not find the opportunity to sail up the Leven to Ulverston, or up the Kent to Arnside: both these estuaries are approached by uncharted channels in the sands, dry except for a few hours at high water. With its limestone headlands and the background of the Lake District hills, this northern shore of Morecambe Bay is most attractive. There is a flourishing sailing club at Arnside, and it is possible to launch a dinghy there: easier than the approach up the uncharted channel. The south shore of Morecambe Bay also has its shallow channels, up to Cockerham and Pilling, and also the much more considerable estuary of the Wyre. The entrance to Fleetwood and Knott End does not dry out, unlike the Lune. It is well buoyed and is used by trawlers, a hovercraft, and considerable commercial traffic. Skippool, four miles up the Wyre, is a fairly popular sailing centre, reached for four hours at the top of the tide. One day we crossed the bay to Furness, that isolated part of Lancashire, to sail past the sands of Walney Island for a brief landing on Piel Island and a drink at its pub. We were in company with Howard and Barbara in their Topaz; it was a day of flat calm and hot sun, and most of our progress was under power.

On July 28th we left Glasson for the second leg of our triangular trip, to Beaumaris, a passage of seventy miles taking us twenty miles out into the Irish Sea. This was Eolet’s longest passage yet, and its success was rather dimmed by the worn-out state of the sails and by a leak we could not trace, which had been troubling us all season, and which became quite alarming in a rough sea. The crew consisted of Michael Samain (who brought his R.D.F. set), my older children, Judith and Jan, and myself. We left Glasson at 1300 with a forecast of northerly winds 3 — 5. It rained as we sailed with the tide out of the Lune to Shell Wharf Buoy. Here we set a course of true S .W. allowing for leeway. As the rain stopped, the wind strengthened, and we found the seas quite as large as we liked for a long night’s sail. Two hour watches below had to include spells of baling, and the water swished about inside the boat, making it feel, as Judith said, like being inside a washing machine. The children slept, all the same and Judith even changed into glamorous pyjamas. The R.D.F. set encouraged us with the news that, according to Console readings, we were on course and sailing at five knots.

At 2000 we double-reefed the main, but steering was still hard work. It must have been more than force four. At 2200 I saw the Orme light, and at this point changed course temporarily to let a ship pass — we must have been crossing the Mersey shipping lane some miles west of the North-West L .V. This was the only vessel we saw that night. I could see the lights of the coast towns of North Wales.

It was my watch below at 0140, when Michael exclaimed “There’s a ruddy great tear in the mainsail!” This brought me out in a hurry. In came the sail, almost in two parts, and Jan and I took over. He insisted that he wasn’t tired, and took his turn at steering under jib only. By now this was all the sail we needed — force five at least, I should say. To the south I could see the Orme light and now also the dark lump of the Orme itself. Ahead I could see Trwyn Du light at the entrance to the Menai Straits, and could glimpse Puffin Island as a lump sometimes visible on the horizon. We could carry on without changing course through the shallower entrance channel, that to the east of Puffin. There is always just enough water for a shallow draft boat there, though the main channel runs between Puffin and Trwyn Du, and is approached from the west of the island. The seas were very rough by now, and one licked over the stern into the cockpit as we reached the shallowest spot. As dawn came we could see the cliffs of the island, and hear (and smell) the herring gulls in full chorus. The tide was against us, and progress was slow up the Menai Straits, along the green and wooded shore of Anglesey which now sheltered us from the force of the wind and gave us smooth water. To the south the cloud-covered Carnedds emerged into sight. This channel does not quite dry out, but it is shallow and winding at low water. The tides run strongly, and eventually we started the engine, to reach Beaumaris at 0600.

The Menai Straits must be unequalled south of Scotland for their combination of a fine coast with a background of 3000 foot hills. There is much more water here than we are used to on the Dee — there are moorings which do not dry out. Once one is used to the run of the tide, with its changing watershed between Menai Bridge and Penmon Point, one can enjoy fine sailing here. The rocky coast of Anglesey with its many attractive bays, the Conway estuary and the Straits themselves, make an ideal cruising ground: we only wish it were nearer, but it takes us three and a half hours to drive there from home.

On August 31st Jan and I set off from Beaumaris for the return to Heswall. Our mended sails held this time, but we brought borrowed spares to be on the safe side. The leak, too, was less troublesome in quieter seas. We later found that the boat had landed on something sharp and had a split in a garboard near the mast foot. We left at 1700, with a light northerly breeze against which we tacked down to Puffin. Then it backed west of north and became a good, full-sail breeze. Jan and I took half-hour spells at the helm until 2100, when he fell asleep for the night. We kept well out to seaward of the Orme, whose towering limestone cliffs always disturb the wind. Here we saw another boat also bound for the Dee, but left her astern. The breeze strengthened and took us all the way to Rhyl, where it began to fade. We passed the Earwig bell-buoy off Prestatyn, but when we reached the South Hoyle buoy we were quite becalmed. Fickle breezes prevented me from anchoring, but we lost ground as the tide ebbed. Not until morning, when we were eating breakfast surrounded by our old friends the Hoyle Bank seals, did a breeze spring up — from the south-east! It quickly became so fresh that we reefed, but by the time we were tacking through Welshman’s Gut, between the sands of West Hoyle and Salisbury Middle, in the mouth of the Dee, we shook our reefs out again. We tacked up the gutter along the clay cliffs of Thurstaston, and reached Heswall at the top of the tide at 1500 hrs. We drifted in the failing breeze to our mooring, to find that the buoy had disappeared in the three months of our absence. We managed to anchor in the right spot, and picked up our chain as the tide fell.

We had sampled Liverpool Bay from the sandy and muddy estuaries to the north to the rocky coast of Anglesey to the south — sailing past the inhospitable stretches of South Lancashire and Wales east of the Orme, lingering in those two fine cruising grounds, Morecambe Bay and the Menai Straits. These are quiet waters. Beaumaris was the most popular sailing centre we visited, but even there the cries of the yachting press that there is no room anywhere, and we must build marinas to pack ourselves like sardines, seem irrelevant. We found a friendly welcome at the North West Venturer’s Club at Gallows Point (Beaumaris) and at the Glasson Sailing Club. We think we are lucky to live within reach of such varied and interesting sailing waters.