050:05.790 N
005:06.830 W

The Voose, Helford River

Our peaceful anchorage off Mousehole last night was perfect to recharge batteries after our 27hr crossing which hadn’t offered any downtime (you can read between the lines here that it was a pretty wild, unpleasant sail in a very rolling motion!)

Today was therefore just what was needed, champagne sailing from midday until we dropped anchor up the beautiful Helford River at 1900. Penzance Bay was calm so despite the wind being on the nose it was ideal sailing conditions and TC sailed very smoothly, tacking out into the Channel with ‘Geoff’ the wind pilot (an Aeries) steering.

We’d worked out when to round The Lizard with a fair tide so it was lovely to get that right and be going 6-7 knots as the iconic peninsular came and went. Yachts are advised to keep 3 miles off shore in bad weather but today was calm enough to be less than 1 mile off, apart from some choppy water for a short while it was fine.

Bol spotted a commotion out to sea, white fizzing water was alive with fish jumping and splashing and the air was hectic with birds; a feeding frenzy in full flow. So impressive to see and exciting to stumble upon nature at its most frenetic. As a result, we deployed the fishing rod, sadly not even a tickle, clearly the birds had cleaned up.

Yachts sailing under spinnakers were coming from the French coast looked like they were having a stunning sail; the wind held until we turned in towards the Helford River and ghosted into the anchorage, only motoring at the end.

We’ve looked back through our previous blog and see we are in exactly the same spot we anchored with Harry and Isabelle in August 2014, it was our jumping off point before heading south. There are quite a lot of yachts in this anchorage and the various beaches have BBQs going making the air full of delicious things cooking, clearly the summer holidays are here.

Happy hour and supper in the cockpit as the sunset, bliss.