Some sail-ins are spectacular for their natural beauty, Rio and Vancouver come to mind. Some sail-ins have wonderous cityscapes, New York or Sydney. Sailing across the bar into the Fal River to Falmouth is not spectacular, it is gentle, it is pretty, with fresh May flowers and green lawns. Falmouth is the main port of Cornwall. It used to be a major port for the UK but now it is a smaller town, around 25,000, that has a university (a couple of the pictures reference that) and a branch of the National Maritime Museum.
We were supposed to be in Falmouth until 6 PM but the Captain told us that because a storm was coming in from the Atlantic he wanted us all aboard by 4:30. He wanted to get out to sea and around Land’s End before the main part of the storm hit, so we would have a shorter time in Falmouth than we had expected.
We decided to follow our original plan, taking the train to Truro, (covered in a separate post) the Cornish seat of government and the cathedral town, which meant that we had lass time in Falmouth than we had hoped. But we did get a chance to sail in, sail out and walk through Falmouth, and spent an hour or so in the Maritime Museum. (More text follows the picture gallery.)
We dutifully got back on Prinsendam before 4:30 and went up to the Crow’s Nest bar to watch the sail-out, but we just sat there. Finally an obviously frustrated captain told us that while we had done our part by getting onboard on time the pilot was holding the ship in port because a bar developed in the estuary and we would need to wait for high tide to leave, which meant that we sat until just after 6 PM and sailed into the storm, which did not seem as bad as predicted. But we did have our share of pitching until we rounded Land’s End, at which point the pitch became a roll, which the stabilizers could control to a point. But last night we made sure to eat our ration of ginger handed out by uniformed crew members in pill box hats.
