The Skerries from Bull Bay - 14th August 2016

A more settled forecast saw me head to Anglesey for a couple of days paddling. On the first day I met up with Alan from the Macclesfield club. We fancied "doing something a bit longer" so given the timing of the tides (low tide at Holyhead at 2:40pm) we decided to do a round trip to the Skerries along the north coast.

With the tidal assistance you can cover "ground" fairly quickly, so we left the cars at Bull Bay and headed out into the westward ebbing tidal flow. The Skerries were 16km to the west but it only took us about 1 hour 40 minutes to get there.

On the way out I was treated to the sight of a dolphin/porpoise completely breaching out of the water. I was talking to Alan and looking his way, and the mammal jumped out of the water about a hundred metres behind him. He looked around and only saw the splash.

With weak tides the trip out to the Skerries was a relatively simple navigation excercise - we got ourselves into a position E/NE of the islands and tuned our course appropriately.

The Skerries were bustling with boats - kayaks, sailing boats, speedboats and jet skis. The benign sea conditions had brought everyone out.

Not much room on the beach!

We ate lunch below the lighthouse. The last few Terns were still nesting on the island, so there were lots of signs asking people not to leave the main path so we didn't do any exploring.

We set off back again around 1:45pm. In theory the "flood" flow should have started around 2pm, but we didn't seem to be picking up much assistance, so the initial crossing back towards West Mouse was a bit of a slog.

West Mouse

West Mouse resident

Luckily as we neared Harry Furlong's (or Furlough's) Rocks we started to get some benefit from the tide and we were going at a more reasonable pace.

It took us about 2 and a half hours to return to Bull Bay.

35km round trip.