Downies Friday 18 June.

We arrived in the bay at tea time, the sun was shining and there is a lovely sweeping beach lined by a caravan park and a small harbour at the west end.

There were supposed to be 8 visitor moorings but there was only 1 and a local fisherman had moored his catch box to it. Catch boxes are common in Ireland and it wasn't the first time we had found locals using the public moorings for themselves. At the end of he day they put their catch in the boxes to keep fresh.

We approached the harbour wall and were advised by a man on the end of the pier that there wasn't enough water alongside. I therefore decided to moor alongside the catch box. We dropped the tender and went ashore for a look around and found a small store which by chance had the 4.5kg butane gas bottles that we use. They're not generally available in Ireland as they use different size bottles and fittings. The last one we got was at the beginnning of May in a fishing shop in Kinsale. We carry 2 bottles and hadn't run out yet but were glad to find a spare. We took the gas bottle and some provisions we had bought back to the boat. We were returning to shore when the fishing boat returned and beckoned us over. We had an amicable chat about the box, I was happy for him to leave it there but when we were on the shore we could see that he had decided to move it. Looking over his side I could see that he had lots of full boxes. I asked mummy if she wanted any fish. With that the 2 deck hands grabbed a hand full of fish each, about 16 fish in all. I said hang on there's only 3 of us and we accepted 7 fish. With that the skipper asked did we also want some crab legs and they threw some in the boat. They wanted nothing for them. I thanked them and we went our way.

We then went ashore to the pub which was quite lively compared to those we have been in recently on the islands. Returning to the boat for a crab leg supper. The man on the pier end who had earlier advised us that we probably didn't have enough water alondside turned out to be from the work boat alonsdie the peir. They were refurbishing the moorings, hence the reason there was only one and not eight.

A small craft warning was in operation for tonight with winds expected to reach force 6 on most Irish coasts. They were right and we had a restless night on the mooring. We thought that if it was nice the next day we may stay and have a day on the beach, but this turned out to not be the case and it was still blowing the next morning so we left for Lough Swilly.