Motor through the night from Holyhead to Ardglass. Watch a Force 7 gale from the safety of the harbour and sail to our new home in Bangor Northern Ireland

We had left Holyhead in Wales and had just watched the sun come down with the briefest of green flashes. As the Autumn is now on us, the days are getting shorter, so when midnight came around it was pitch black, and we were eating the remains of a stew, which we had cooked up for our supper. I joked about becoming a gremlin as I was eating after midnight, but lukily this did not happen, but we did come listen to a Mayday call of a man who had just grounded off the rocks, just South of Port St. Mary in the Isle of Man. The man could not give a precise location, so the coastguard was trying to get him to download an app called What 3 words, which has mapped the whole of the earth and has allocated every 3meter square with a three word phrase, so while we are berthed in Bangor, our address is reason.crunch.saving it was a service that I had never heard about before, but it was interesting to learn that the coastguard were recommend using it as a means, of finding the guys location.

The other incidents that happened in the passage was when Beverley was asleep and I was on lookout and I needed the toilet, so I looked around and there was no one on the horizon, so I nipped downstairs, when I returned there was a huge ferry going across our stern. We were in no danger, but it really brought home to me that even a simple action, like going to the toilet can take a lot longer than you think, for Beverley, her incident was when she was on watch and she fell asleep. Both incidents made us realise that we were tired more than we realised and that the safest course of action was to go in to Ardglass and have a break, so we came in very early and just collapsed for a few hours.

Later that day we went for a walk around the old fishing harbour and looked out to sea. We had only been asleep for a few hours, but already a storm with force 7 winds had arrived, The storm had been the other reason we had decided to stop in Ardglass, we should of been able to get into Belfast Lough before the storm had arrived, but what if something had gone wrong with our calculations, we had already realised that the crew was tired, adding a storm onto the items that needed to be dealt with was too much. In flying, there is a rule that it is always the third thing that kills you. We knew that we were tired, we knew that there was a storm coming, you are already on two issues. you can see that it wouldn't take much to add that one extra fatal issue, so it was much wiser to come in and rest, rather that have to deal with a storm.

While we were in Ardglass, we talked about our reasons for changing our plans and going to Bangor Northern Ireland for winter

• We would be in a great marina which has 5 gold anchors
• We would be paying £6 per night to be in the Marina for the winter
• We would be able to do some sailing in the winter
• Beverley had relatives in Northern Ireland
• The weather was getting worse
• The nights were getting shorter
• We planned to do our yacht masters, so we would get some training in over the winter months

Once the storm had passed, we continued our passage to Belfast Lough. We called in at Carrickfergus first, to see Beverley's Mum, before our last sail of our trip across the lough to our home for the winter in Bangor Marina