Red Bay Northern Ireland

Approaching Red Bay

We hadn’t really planned to stop in Red Bay but we had known that we would need to stop somewhere along the Antrim coast as the tide was going to turn against us before we could complete our passage through North Channel to Gigha.  Red Bay was as far north as we could get and, in fact, as we made our approach past Garron Point (the southern headland of the bay’s entrance), the tide was already sluicing against us at 2knots.

Garron Point

After seemingly spending a lot of time in the same bit of sea, we made it through the entrance and the tide dropped off a bit, but not a huge amount.  The tide here flows a long way into the bay, curves around and comes out along the southern shore so we were fighting the tide in almost to the point at which we anchored.

Garron Point is high, dark and quite forbidding and indeed much of the land around the bay is high.  In the southwest corner there is an open valley, significantly greener than much of the surrounding land but southwesterly winds blow strongly from here…..as we found, despite there having been little wind at sea.

At anchor in Red Bay

We dropped anchor in the southwest corner, to the south of the fish farm and not so close inshore that we infringed on the no anchoring area, a marine protection zone for eelgrass.  Having taken a few pictures we got our heads down for a couple of hours.  The plan was to be up and en route again as soon as the tide turned again in our favour.

The Mull of Kintyre in the distance (R).  The gap between Northern Ireland and the Mull was our next
tidal gate to pass through

Red Bay, Northern Ireland