All posts by Simon
NEW 2022. Jamila’s last sail to Piel 2021
Last sail of 2021. Was welcomed by a Piel Island cottage dweller with a nice cup of tea.
Sailors are best served Warm and Dry.
I used to be one of the first sailors up in the morning. At the crack of dawn, I would have been there exchanging banter with fellow sailors across the anchorage in Piel harbour, shivering, clutching a cup of steaming hot tea as the sun climbed over the local hills.
Recently, things have changed. Now I’m the last club member to awake. And when I do, it is with a feeling of extreme cosiness leading to yet another ten minutes in the bunk. Often, dreams are the most colourful and memorable at that time of the morning when all is warm and well.
What has happened, you might ask? Well, the answer is a recently fitted charcoal stove running silently through the night, keeping the boat warm and dry.
In fact, it is at its best on those miserable rainy mornings when cold, damp condensation is the norm. With a stove burning low in your hull, it is like having central heating in your boat.
Here’s the story in photographs –
NEW March 2022: A Wardley’s Trip to Piel Island
There were a lot of trips to Piel Island over the 2021 season. This is just one of them. The main aim is to get out to sea, watch the Lancashire coast with work and worries left far behind. See the Cumbrian coast in the distance come closer and closer. Navigate into the channel and find an anchorage. Get ashore in a small inflatable dinghy. Walk the walk up the long inclined jetty capable of handling a 36-foot tide, order a pint in the Ship Inn, then pay homage to the King of Piel (order more pints). Get back to our moored boats in spite of the 4-knot running tide. Hopefully, sail back into the arms of our loving families the following day.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!Avdt5RQD1Hg_lL5c9ZEINe7QVkS4vw?e=ReGklO
NEW March 2022: A visit to Heysham Village
One of the pretty, and dare I say, cute places to visit around the UK coast, is Heysham Village. It is situated right at the far southern tip of the Morecambe Promenade. The broad walk of the promenade, roughly the width of a three-lane highway, runs a massive six miles before petering out at this little village location. There isn’t really much to the ancient village, which dates from the Roman time. It is mainly based around a single main road bordered with an aesthetically pleasing mixture of stone cottages and more substantial villa type houses, with a lovely pub that has encroached onto its adjoining stable building, an ancient church with magnificent views over Morecambe Bay, and where the single road eventually and rather pleasingly becomes a slipway into the sea, or on to the sand, depending on which state of the tide.
Click of any of these following images to see full size: –