25/32 Kilrush to Dingle. This next leg starts with great footage of dolphins in the Shannon estuary.
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It's more difficult seas and strong winds as Shark Bay has more engine problems and limps towards Dingle...the seaside village made famous by the filming of Ryan's Daughter on the golden sands of the strand. A bit of mechanical improvisation makes a temporary fix to enable the Great Motorboat Tour to press on southwards on blissfully flat calm water. Next stop en route to the rocky outcrops of The Skelligs.
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25/32 KIlrush to Dingle. This next leg starts with great footage of dolphins in the Shannon estuary.
I said as we were leaving I wonder if we’ll see the dolphins and yes we did! What a great start to the day. They’re actually a resident pod of dolphins that live in the Shannon Estuary. Although they go outside the estuary to feed, they’re found to be genetically different to any of the dolphins outside. So they’re a little subgroup here, which interbreed among themselves and not the other dolphins that circle the coast of Ireland. I was so stoked to actually see them here this morning – great start to the day!
After a nightmare four hours it was so good to be met by another dolphin – Dingle’s resident dolphin “Fungi”. Because until we got into the shelter of the harbour, we’d again encountered engine problems and increasingly big and confused seas, with winds gusting up to 4-7.
We’ve just arrived in Dingle and it feels like we’ve just about got in here as well. We left the Shannon this morning. We were cruising nice and easy although it was quite a strong northwest and a bit of swell and chop across the way, but we were running diagonally with it so it was alright. The next thing I know, the engine starts revving. So I pulled it back and thought, “Here we go, we’ve hit something again.”
Turns out that wasn’t case. What had happened was, somehow, I’d beached the engines! There’s this button here – you can bring the engines right up. The prop was literally sticking out of the water. It sounded like it was cavitating. … It wouldn’t work at first, so we turned it off and turned it on, then two seconds later the engine just beached itself straight up, cavitating. It kept doing it. We started chugging on one engine but we had quite a way to go. We heard on the radio that the forecast was 4-5 and occasionally 7 off the headlands and then started having engine problems. It was pretty interesting – then it got bloody wet – soaked.
So basically we made it there by John forcibly holding the button down and keeping the engines in check – it was a constant battle. We thought for those 15 miles that once we get around the corner we can head south into the bay here at Dingle – and we did it. We’re feeling good now and we’re bloody starving. We left the Shannon at about 6:30 this morning thinking we’d come here for breakfast.
Hello, Adrian?
Adrian, it’s John, hi there.
Hi John, how are you doing?
That’s great – it’s Sunday afternoon but rung Adrian and what he’s told me is to get the engine where we want to be and disconnect the solenoids – disconnect the switches. That way it won’t go up and it won’t go down but it should stay in the right place all the time.
So we found what Adrian’s talking about – here’s the pump, the two relays and the two plugs. The electrics are still being a bit weird but we’ve managed to get the engine where we want it, so we’re going to pull the plug and hopefully that’s where it’ll stay. A quick fix until we get back, hopefully.
It was a temporary fix, but the problem was solved for now. With winds still increasing, we decided to overnight here in Dingle.
One thing we’ve learnt on this trip is you go to bed on a bad weather forecast, and you ignore it, because you just get up in the morning and see what the weather’s actually like. This is one of those classic mornings – we were forecast a 4-5 north-easterly-going, possibly 6-7, as strong as we had it yesterday. Got up in the morning and at the moment it’s glass-calm. 6 o’clock in the morning, typical Kerry morning, the clouds just on top of the mountains. So we’re going to make the most of it, gonna head across to Portmagee, maybe the Skelligs depending on the weather, although it’s drizzling and raining a lot so we’ll see… and down to Derrynane. It might blow up, but seize the moment!
Here he comes!
Next morning Fungi again came to see us off on our voyage.
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