By all rights tonight’s parkup ought to be awful. The single lane access road bifurcates a public golf course which assures high traffic. After a sharp 90° turn to avoid a beach and the ocean, one finds a pie shaped parkup for maybe four reasonably sized RVs which means lots of people want your space and they’ll do most anything to get there first. It can be quite cutthroat and they’ll probably stay for the sunset. The narrow lane continues with cars haphazardly parallel parked against a stone wall for a quarter mile until several tiny cars could pull straight into a few spaces near the end.
Regardless it’s a lovely spot and somehow we shoehorned EV into a questionable spot to wait for a better one. It’s our superpower. We wait. We have some lunch. We take a stroll. We wait.
We walked out on the beach to a pier to visit some rocks with magnificent Fair Head in the background.
It’s funny that headlands were always good reason for extreme caution when we were sailing past them but now on land we find them quite beautiful, dramatic, and hard to resist.
In the evening while relaxing after dinner I sensed movement in the pie shaped RV section a quarter mile away. We had an Escape Velocity fire drill with Marce hoofing it down the road while I backed EV out and headed towards what we hoped would be an actual RV parking space. We barely made it to the vacated space in time and we may have disappointed a fellow traveler but I must say it made for a relaxed night’s sleep.
The following morning while sipping my first coffee something caught my eye just off the beach.
A square rigged barque hove into view.
You don’t see this everyday and with all sails furled we could see she was headed for the outer harbor. She rounded up into the wind and splashed anchor. Marce looked her up in Marine Traffic and she’s called Thalassa out of Troon, Scotland.
There was some breeze this morning and the swell began to surge in sending the barque into a wicked corkscrewing roll.
Well hidden, tucked deep behind a headland I’m sure she had every expectation of a calm night but it’s amazing how much the swell can wrap around a headland, as much as 30° is not uncommon. Boats have a diabolical predilection toward lying ahull in a sympathetic roll with the swell. It can really get nasty. Those sailors did not have a comfortable night and I’ll bet not many opted for breakfast.
Later we walked into Ballycastle in search of edible eggs Benedict.
What we found was honestly the most perfect cinnamon roll I’ve ever had in a bakery called Ursa Minor. To this day I rue the fact that I only bought two. Pictures? Surely you jest.