Sorry it has been a while since the last blog post - we've been a bit busy!
On Friday morning, we moved from Mylor to a mooring buoy off Falmouth town. We raced around first thing and managed to get the last one! After home school, we went ashore and got the train into Truro. We spent some of our pocket money on skateboards that were on sale! We did a little test ride, then we went to the cathedral. We learnt about refugees and people who had moved to Cornwall.
When we got back to Falmouth, the shanty festival was on. We listened to some sea shanties, and Daddy knew a lot of them.
On Saturday, we went ashore in the morning and had showers. After lunch we went ashore again and listened to some more shanties at the Chain Locker pub. We met some people with dogs and they let us play with them. When we left the owners paid us £1 for looking after them so we got paid to play with dogs!
We went to see the new movie Inside Out 2, which was really good, we recommend that you go and see it. It is about a girl who is growing up and she has new emotions like anxiety, ennui, embarassment and envy.
On Sunday morning we went ashore again to hear some more shanties and buy some shopping for our trip to Ireland. After lunch, we left Falmouth and sailed past the Lizard and we saw a sunfish and some dolphins.
We went to bed while Mummy and Daddy took turns to sail Coconut through the night.
We had a bit of wind but not enough to sail quickly so we motored most of the time.
On Monday, it was Mummy's birthday.
She was very lucky - we saw three Atlantic Grey seals, a puffin (which is Mummy's favourite bird) and three pods of dolphins. Some of the dolphins were jumping right out of the water. The wind was totally calm so the sea was oily and still, and we could see the dolphions zooming beside the boat underwater before they jumped out.
We went to bed after dinner, and when we woke up we were in Ireland, in Dun Laogharie marina. It was our longest sailing trip so far, about 240 miles and it took us 32 hours.
On Monday we did home school, then in the afternoon we went to the National Maritime Museum which is based in a church. They had a titanic corner, a morse code machine, a lego model ship built of 13,000 bricks which had one side in normnal colours from before the war and the other side in grey sea cammo which it had during the war. There wasd an RNLI exhibit and stories about some famous shipwrecks.
Today, after home school, we went into Dublin on the DART train and went exploring. We went to the Jeannie Johnshon, which is a replica of a "famine ship" which was used to bring Cargo from Canada to Ireland and emmigrants from Ireland to Canada during the great hunger in 1845 to 1855. The Jeannie Johnson had a very good reputation because the captain took very good care of the passengers and nobody ever died on board. The captain employed a doctor and provided food for the passengers. On most of the famine ships about 30% of the passengers died on each journey. On the final voyage, the vessel slowly sank with only the crew on board, and the crew were rescued after 9 days lashed to the top of the mast. Even then, nobody died! On the first voyage, before the ship had even left Ireland, one of the passengers had a baby on board.
We had lunch in a nice italian cafe, I (Archie) had a slice of pizza as big as my face. Then we went to the Little Museum of Dublin and learnt about the history of the people of Dublin and how Ireland became an independent country.
We went to a pub so that Daddy could have a pint of Guinness.
Then we went to see Leader which is the boat that Mimi and Papadon (editors note - Archie and Fergus's grandparents) owned when Daddy was growing up. She was a nice big boat but the ceilings were very low inside.
