Glengarriff

We headed further into Bantry Bay and made our way up to Glengarriff with a very strong following wind and huge surfing rollers, piling straight in from the Atlantic storms. At one point we reached 12.3 knots on the GPS – hardly exciting news in a car, but well over double our normal cruising speed on a boat. A journey that we had expected to take around 4½ hours was completed in about 3.

Glengarriff Harbour has absolutely stunning scenery, with mountains all around in the background and lots of wooded hills coming down to the shoreline. There are several colonies of seals and we saw plenty of them hauling themselves out onto rocks near the boat – presumably to rest, since they had slim chance of sunning themselves!

We found a noticeboard giving details of a “Sli Na Slainte” or “Walk for Health” and decided to give it a try. All I can say is that someone in Cork County Council has a very strange idea of health. The main part of the ‘trail’ is along a main road with no pavement or verges with a speed limit of 100 km/h, and lots of blind bends! After a nasty incident with an oncoming transit van on our side of the road and an articulated lorry storming down the other side of the road, we decided our healthiest option was to get back to town as quickly as possible.

The gales were forecast to change direction so we decided to cross to the other side of the harbour for more shelter. On the way, we took the opportunity to raft up on one of the ferry boats to fill our water tanks from the tap on the pier. Nice idea but somewhat tricky in practice. Our hose was several metres too short so we ended up filling our main water tanks (which hold around 120 litres each) using 5 and 10 litre water containers. Needless to say, it took a while……