The Day We Saw the Warship - and the Lifeboats !

On Sunday we went out to the Skellig's once more.  We had Kathleen with us for the first time well over  year and our "regular" co skipper Breda.  It was an almost perfect day - the only thing was the lack of any wind, which meant that we had to motor all the way.
We took lots of photo's - of the Napoleonic look-out tower on the end of the peninsula, of lunch with all the flowers on it (all of which are edible) and the islands.  But the first real surprise was the naval frigate just sitting off the islands.  It was traveling very slowly around and around the islands.  It continued to do this well after we had headed for Valentia for the night and a deserved drink at the hotel there !  The possible purpose of this action only became a little clearer to us 10 days later.

The Napoleonic look-out tower.

A fine day and the naval frigate by the Skelligs

Breda on watch !

The small landing stage on Skellig Michael

Some of the thousands of Gannets on Skellig Beog

Very calm conditions

And here we are, Jill and yours truly.

The lighthouse at Valentia

 Neither of these two lifeboats are the regular one from Valentia.  She was in Southampton being fitted with the new, more powerful engine and the crew were being re-trained.

An idyllic scene

The Protestant Church on the island. A really lovely little structure from when the island was the trans-Atlantic nerve center for the first cable to be laid between Britain and the USA.

 For Kathleen ! One of her stones, with a cross!

The beautiful track down to Glenleam Gardens.

The 19th Century clock tower - and it still goes !

The next day the outer boat was heading off to the north. And here behind the two lifeboats is our yacht - Baltic Amber, with Cahersiveen and the Kerry mountains in the background. It took very competent boat handling to squeeze Baltic Amber into the corner so I was as close to the pub as possible.!

Here we are after a rainy early morning heading back to Dingle - a couple of hours away..

Amazing cloud scapes.

And 10 days later on the TV news we got a hint of what the frigate was doing - apart from simply wasting time !  You see, there was one of the largest drug seisures in Dublin.  So, it could well have been brought in around this time and  lodged in its various houses.  And then the culprits picked up.

A calm day at Charlie's Island

When we motored out from Dingle there was hardly a breath of wind but close to Charlies Island there was a two foot swell. We tied up to the buoy and Jill produced this fabulous lunch. There were birds nesting all over the Island but particularly on the cliff face - so we had a marvelous view of Puffins  and Guillemots.

This is Charlies buoy which we tied up to.

The reason behind taking this photo is that we spotted an otter playing around in the sea and this is the bast photograph that we could get of it.

These are the rocks near the island with there three holes through, this is a difficult photo to take because usually you do not see them. Locally they are known as the Cathedral rocks.

On our trip we saw lots of Common Dolphins - they were with up almost all day, with some going and others coming up to the boat.  Breada took this short video of them with her camera.