Posts In June 15, 2017
Construction began on James Fort in 1602 after the English victory over the Spanish and Irish in the 1601 Battle of Kinsale. The fort fell into neglect, and became known as “Old Fort”, once contruction began in 1678 on Charles Fort across the harbour. While James Fort isn’t nearly the tourist attraction that Charles Fort…
Despite our best efforts, we didn’t come close to visiting all the pubs in Kinsale, let alone all the restaurants. The problem seems as challenging as in Halifax, NS, despite Kinsale having a population of only 5,000 compared to Halifax’s 316,000. We’re told that at one point Kinsale had 38 pubs. And we didn’t have…
Charles Fort was completed in 1682 at Kinsale and is one of the largest military installations in Ireland. The fort is open to the public and receives over 85,000 visitors a year. It’s an easy 45-minute waterfront walk from the marina, with two pubs along the way. Trip highlights from May 27th in Kinsale, Ireland…
Cork is Ireland’s second largest city and is about a 45-minute bus ride from Kinsale. The main reason we went there was to pickup a SIM card for cellular data, and after we we had a great time touring around this urban but historic river city and, of course, checking out a couple of pubs….
On our 2,800nm North Atlantic passage from Newport, RI to Ireland we passed through three gales. The first two were in the initial week of the passage, before we turned the corner south of the Grand Banks. It was during the first gale that we battled a water ingress issue that set off alarms a…
In 2014 we published A More Flexible Power System for Dirona. This article ran in the April 2016 PassageMaker issue and aspects of this design have been offered as options on new Nordhavn builds. Since that article was published there has been considerable progress in lithium-ion battery technologies. All forms of Li-Ion battery technology offer…
We completed our Fastnet-to-Fastnet run and arrived into Kinsale, Ireland after a 17-day, 2,801 nm crossing of the North Atlantic. And we shared our first pint at an Irish pub—we’d been looking forward to that from almost the moment we left Newport. This was by far our most difficult passage we have done, with three…
In over 13,000 engine hours and some 95,000 miles of travel, we’ve never had a mechanical emergency at sea and never have had to distrub the off-watch person to deal with an issue. This happened twice on the passage from Newport to Ireland, the first was the high bilge water alarm last week during James’…
The first seven days of our 2,800nm passage from Newport RI to Kinsale, Ireland were a battle. We battled negative Bay of Fundy currents, low-pressure systems, and a water-ingress issue that threatened the boat and took us ten hours to resolve. On the positive side, we also got a push from the Gulf Stream and…
Newport Yachting Center was a wonderful place to live for a few weeks as we staged for our Atlantic crossing. The marina had just put its docks back in the water the week prior to our arrival, but we didn’t realize just how early we were in their season until we’d been there a month…
We generally keep Dirona ready to go to sea at a moment’s notice, and securing the cockpit furniture is typically all we need to do as we get underway. For multi-day passages, we do some additional preparation ranging from provisioning, to heavy weather preparation, to paperwork necessary to bring Spitfire into a new country. Highlights…
We haven’t had steering issues in the past. Given they can happen anywhere, why the heck would it occur within hours of dead-center on our 2,800 nm trip through the North Atlantic? We have covered a lot of miles over the years and generally have seen pretty good conditions. The weather we’ve encountered has been…
I bolted awake at 1:15am to a shrieking alarm. We were 50 miles south of the Grand Banks, in large seas, on passage from Newport, RI to Kinsale, Ireland. I ran upstairs to the pilot house and Jennifer, at the helm, just said “high bilge water.” Yuck. Better than fire but far from good news….
For quite some time now we have been watching a very large low in the weather models coming down from Greenland. The storm is currently predicted to bring 20′ waves on 10 second period, with 25 to 30 kt winds. With 20′ waves nominal, there will be some that approach or exceed our 30′ mast…
Fort Adams guards the harbor entrance to Newport and is the largest coastal fortification in the US. The parade area is 800ft across and covers 6.5 acres. We can see the fort from our berth at Newport Yachting Center and on a warm, sunny day finally got over for a tour. On the way we…
We plan on getting underway this weekend for Kinsale, Ireland. It’s a tiny bit early in the season but we have what looks to be a blocking high developing in the North Atlantic which will stall the steady stream of low-pressure systems that we’ve been watching for the past several months. Unfortunately the high is…
A couple of days after we arrived into Newport, we found the breaker for the pilothouse 120V outlets had tripped. We investigated all the electronics plugged into the PH outlets but the breaker would still trip. We eventually unplugged everything and it still tripped so it had to be a bad breaker or a circuit…
We’ve been studying the weather every day as we prepare for our Atlantic crossing from Newport, RI to Kinsale, Ireland. We use a variety of data sources, including NOAA surface analysis and 500MB forecasts. The sources we rely most heavily on are GRIB files containing data from computer-generated models such as NOAA GFS and WAVEWATCH…