Headlands often mark the great milestones when making a voyage under sail. Some of my earliest sailing memories as a small child were rounding notorious promontories – such as the Lizard, Start Point or Portland Bill on the southern coast of England, or Cap de la Hague, the Raz de La Seine or Pointe de Penmarch on the French coast. Those memories mostly comprise feeling seasick - as headlands always seem to bring on more extreme conditions as the wind accelerates around them

The huge high-pressure system that had been sitting over the UK since March might have been bad news for our farmers, who were now suffering one of the worse spring droughts on record. But for sailors heading southwest this was great news. High pressure means easterly winds in the English Channel, the perfect wind for sailing over to France and beyond – as opposed to the supposedly prevailing foul south westerlies. So from Newton Ferrers we had a fabulous fast fair wind ov

Part 2: Newton Ferrers (Heloise) I couldn´t think of a better place to spend our first week of our new life aboard Saecwen than in the village of Newton Ferrers, which has been my family home since my parents moved back from Fiji so many years ago. This was Saecwen’s fourth visit to the Yealm, so it really did feel like coming home, as we tied up on our favourite mooring buoy off ´Misery Point´. However, there is nothing miserable about this mooring at the mouth of the rive