Passage: Isle of Man to Whitehaven

 Time to move on ... and head back to the mainland. A trip that took 4-1/2 hours by high-speed ferry would take us a full 24-hour day, including waiting for high tide. And just for fun we'd have reporters from the local BBC news affiliate making the trip with us. It's simultaneously extremely rewarding to see our ship through their eyes, and know we were reaching a wider audience; and frustrating to have our normal shipboard routines complicated by the presence of the cameras. But it definitely gave us the opportunity for some cool images. 

We had every single kind of weather on the trip. It started off cool but clear.

The rail on the quarterdeck is the perfect height for leaning on, gazing out to sea.

"We have wings!!" I exulted in an Instagram post.

Diego, one of our engineers, took the reporter out in the dinghy to get some footage of the ship under sail. First off, it was rough, because in order to sail, by definition, there has to be some wind. And wind makes waves. And they were in the middle of the Irish Sea. In a very small rubber boat. Diego is our designated dinghy pilot because he's very good at it, but even so, they all came back aboard soaking wet from the waist down. "I wish I wasn't the best dinghy driver, so I didn't always have to do this," he grumbled good-naturedly later.

Off they go!

Did this lovely publicity photo make the cold wet dinghy ride worth it? 

Speaking of our normal shipboard routines ... the ship's bell. Originally in the 17th century era that the ship represents, it was used for marking time, shipboard communications, announcing our entry into port, or communicating between vessels of the same fleet.  Even today, on our earlier tours of duty on this ship (10 years ago) three rings of the bell meant “dinnertime!” Ah, technology. Somewhere along the way the bell cracked and the lovely ship wide gong have been replaced by … the “ping” of a text message in our group chat announcing mealtime. The food’s just as good but the atmospheric magic is gone.

A few hours later, I was a tad disappointed to have lost our blue skies, but still delighted to be under sail. 

A bit later it started to rain:

Helm selfies are a little less gloating when its cold and rainy. Sea shanties? I'm living them! Bad weather, they say, makes good sailors. 

The view forward. Note the crew on the foredeck in bright orange rain jackets beginning the process of taking in the sails.

I don't have any pictures of our arrival at Whitehaven. Tides dictated that we arrive in the dark; and in any case I was probably busy doing actual work anyway. But I remember feeling really positive about our visit to the city, at least in part because of the advance publicity. "Hello there Whitehaven! I think we're going to have some fun together."