Leaving Plymouth towards Torquay. 3rd July 2019

In a lot of blogs people don't often admit to their mistakes - read on.

The moral of this story is if you decide not to move on then don't!

As the weather forecast wasn't brilliant and there was red on the met office warning we had decided that we would not move on. This meant the alarm hadn't been set as it would have been an early morning. Plus we'd not done all the prep we normally do the night before in order to have a quick get away.

As is my want I'd got up in the wee small hours to visit the heads and whilst up had a quick look at the weather forecast and the red line had gone! The forecast was for N/E 4/5 becoming variable 3/4. So I set the alarm, not for 5 am that had been our plan but for 5.30 am. (Mistakes starting already). John was a bit shocked at the alarm going off at 5.30 am but I explained about the changing weather and maybe half asleep, but he agreed to go. When we go away it was 6.23 am, normally from alarm to dropping the mooring lines we can be on the move 30 minutes max. So this meant we were later setting off than the original plan.

Although it was lovely coming through  Plymouth Sound within the first hour the jenny was in and out and the engine off and on. We then realised that there was definitely more east than north in the wind and not what we wanted. It was quite windy and on the nose, this meant that we were travelling far slower than planned.  I had optimistically planned for 5 1/2 knots, which to be fair is usually our average but the first four hours had only seen us travel 17.9 miles. an average of less than 4 1/2 knots. things only got slower as the wind was still firmly on the nose and the tide by this time had changed. We hit start point at exactly the wrong time. As we were looking at the light house at Start Point we realised we were actually going nowhere. I grew to hate that light house as it just never moved position. Rather than going on regardless we turned round to head back to Salcombe, whilst I was quickly doing calculations to check we would have enough water under the keel to go over the bar. (We would) The journey to Salcombe was exceedingly quick (and comfortable) as we had both the tide and wind with us. Salcombe looked lovely as we were only staying one night we didn't get the dingy out to explore.

We have two friends who follow us on Marine Traffic, I texted them both to say 'don't ask'.

The moral of this story is, if you decide not to go because of poor weather, don't go. I thought I'd seen a weather window and it wasn't there, a delayed start and a slow passage altered everything because we arrived at a headland when the tide changed and you can never fight the tide. We were always safe but felt foolish.




Sailing Information
Can't comment on facilities as we didn't try them.
Beautiful place to moor, very efficient harbour masters. Be prepared to share a mooring with other boats.
Mileage from Plymouth to Salcombe (via Start Point) 35.3 nm - 9hours 30 minutes