Scotland to England, November
by Kate and Hamish Laird

• Kate & Hamish Laird, with their two children, Anna and Helen, just wound up their summer voyage to Greenland with a November trip from Scotland to the south of England.

	Seal alongside the dock in Rothesay, with Evergreen (another Chuck Paine design) alongside.

Cruising at last! It is a rare thing for us to be sailing without a tight schedule, but as we prepared to leave Scotland on the last leg of our summer voyage to Greenland, we had no deadlines. Well, Hamish's parents were quite keen to have the grandchildren there for Christmas, but we felt sure we could keep that deadline.

We re-launched at Fairlie Quay Marine, with a thirty-knot beam-on wind as we went down into the travel lift slot at low water. The path out was a narrow one – we would have seconds to get the keel and rudder down for better steerage once we cleared the travel lift slings. I had barely a chance to wave good-bye before diving below to operate the keel winch, and Jason put the rudder down while Hamish gunned the engine to keep us in the channel. One of the neat things about the rudder design is that it can be raised and lowered with the engine full ahead or astern, and the helmsman has full steerage during the operation. Many similar designs require a motionless rudder, and sticking ones fingers into the rudder cavity, in order to operate the mechanism.

The Victorian public urinals in Rothesay, arguably the finest in the world (the women’s room is disappointingly modern).

The forecast was lousy, so we sailed across to Bute and docked in Rothesay, home to a fine castle for the girls to explore, and some of the most decorative urinals in the world. They also had a library with a liberal lending policy, so we took out twelve books (mostly for the girls, but with dueling Dan Brown novels for Hamish and me) and surfed the Internet for weather forecasts.

In our month in Scotland, we'd had about fifteen minutes of northerly sector winds, and lots of southwesterly gales. The window, when it opened, would give us several pockets of good weather, but we had to be prepared to stop several times along the way if we didn't want to bash to windward in gales. When we planned to leave, we received an email from a friend on the south coast of England, telling us we should delay, as the forecast was terrible. But we had a good feeling for how far we could go in a day, particularly with the tide assist of the North Channel, so we motored in no wind back to Largs to pick up Jess, fresh from job hunting in Edinburgh, and headed off.

We lay a course for the lee of Ireland, and then, when the winds came strong on the nose, we had no seas to speak off. We cracked off to 50 degrees and Seal loved it. It was a dark night with lots of shipping – a sharp contrast from Greenland, where we had seen less than half a dozen boats cruising in the entire summer, and none at all on the crossing back to Scotland. With four of us standing watch, we took two hours on the helm, and two on standby, and it was quite comforting to have another set of eyes to check the shipping or go plot a bearing and a distance off on the radar.

We stopped briefly in Carlingford Lough, at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and then made a quick jump to Howth outside Dublin. A Martello Tower greeted us on the way in, and we saw the beaches where Stephen Dedalus walked in Ulysses.

The highlight of our dashing visit to Dublin was undoubtedly the Natural History Museum. Jess and Jason went to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells, but Hamish, Helen and Anna and I went to see a gnu. The girls' favorite music this month is Flanders & Swann from the early 1960s, ("G-no, g-no, g-no, I'm a gnu!") and to our delight there was both a gnu and a hartebeest on display.

But the real magic of the trip was the night watches. The weather shaped up to give us favorable winds (or at least a fetch) at night. The moon was waxing full and the lee of Ireland made it some of the fastest sailing I've experienced. Dolphins gathered around in the moonlight for hours at a time, and when we tucked in close to the Irish shore, the shipping lessened.

We had braced ourselves for a cold passage, but though it was colder than from Iceland to Scotland, we had the heater on, and had to strip down to T-shirts and jeans when on standby below.

	Helen and Anna tank testing keel and hull shapes at the Falmouth National Maritime Museum.

We rounded Land's End and pulled into Newlyn for the night. Helen and Anna had their first experience of a proper English pub, and Hamish felt like he'd truly come home for the first time in five years.

The wind turned against us once more, blowing southeast down the channel, so we ducked into Falmouth. The winter residents tied up along the visitors' dock seemed to pour out of their boats to watch the idiots in the big boat try to tie up at dead low water. We slid to a halt in the mud, but then lifted the keel and rudder and came alongside in about six feet of water. Our audience disappeared, no doubt disappointed by the lack of shouting. Just one man remained and offered to take a line.

Helen operating the remote model boats in the Falmouth National Maritime Museum.

We spent the next day at the National Maritime Museum and introduced Jason to Cornish Pasties. This was a far cry from some of our days motoring into 50-knot headwinds just because we had a schedule. We consulted the tides and figured if we left about noon the next day, we'd catch two tides on the way to the Isle of Wight, and have only one stretch against us. The forecast promised a motor in light winds.

The forecast proved wrong – there was just enough wind to keep us sailing, as we passed by a massive naval exercise, with half a dozen huge destroyers charging at us and then whirling around. We tried to stay inshore of them and out of the way, but it was a bit disconcerting to see such tonnage flying around in seemingly random directions, looking rather like lobster boats running their trap lines on a summer morning in Maine.

	Kate sailing past the Needles (Isle of Wight) at dawn.

Just before dawn, we approached the Needles. Hamish relieved me on watch, and I should have gone to bed, but it was magic to see the Isle of Wight resolve itself in the early morning light. Hamish was thrilled to be sailing into home waters, but we were wary of the infamous Shingles Bank – plenty of boats have circumnavigated, only to come to grief on the Shingles. We kept a close eye on the nav and sailed in, and text messaged Hamish's sister with our position.

The whole family was at Fort Victoria waving and hooting as we sailed as close as we dared to the shore. We didn't have to turn on the engine until we came into Yarmouth Harbour, which allowed just enough time for the whole family to regather and see us take four tries at mooring between two pilings at wind against max ebb tide. Very embarrassing. We'll have to practice that one. It would have behooved us to have the dinghy built and alongside and ready to act as a bow thruster. After a summer in Greenland, we're definitely not used to having an audience or having to slalom through other boats!

Everyone came aboard for a glass of champagne (it was eight am by then) and we toasted the end of Seal's maiden voyage. One year of sailing, 12,000 miles. New Hampshire – Bahamas – Belize – New Hampshire – Nova Scotia - Newfoundland – Greenland – Scotland – Ireland – Isle of Wight.

Seal will be chartering again next summer in the Arctic, and then head down for the Antarctic in September.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.