OCEAN MELODY SAILS HOME : Leg 1 : The journey begins here, from Dartmouth to Fowey

Morning, this is kind of it. In some ways this is the start of our journey around the world, very slowly. We are today setting sail, we're not sailing, we're motoring. From here there's no wind, not a breath, so we're making our way to Fowey with a view to making our way up to North Wales. We'll see what Mother Nature has to say about that, but the plan is Fowey today, Falmouth tomorrow and then the rest of the world, no, then North Wales. Have a baby then go. There's Mike and Jack pumping up the tender just in case we need it. We're not planning to need the tender, we're planning to marina hop because it's freezing cold, there's no heating on the boat. Melissa's pregnant, I'm a wuss, we've got Jack with us and we're not interested in making life difficult at this point, so we're going to, we're not anchoring anywhere on the way back and unless something goes wrong we are planning to simply marina hop. So there should be no need for the tender whatsoever, but just having it blown up just in case. Well there's Jack reading, there's Melissa, Mike's on the way through, let's get the engine started and we're off in a second. Let's just preheat and go. What's going on there? Yeah okay good, engine's running and untied and get going. Do you want me to take the bow line off? Yeah okay, 11 21. Dad, can I go up to the front? It's a barge with a crane on. Oh yeah, that's the same one we saw earlier. It was up and down yesterday, I don't know what they're doing. Where do they use that? Oh right, it's only another month really before they start putting all the summer pontoons back in. Of course, so they all come out for winter do they? No, he's pushing that. Oh for Pam, yeah that's right, Pam, well our friend in Florida was rafted up here for a few months in the 70s. You see over there, the lower ferry, that takes the cars across the river and there's another one. You see that you clocked the other one, might have to do a turn I think. Oh and you've got a ferry behind you, bloody hell. Yeah, there you go. I want to make some sort of like seating thing. Yeah we're going to, I think. Fanny's just down checking the engine, checking the bilges. We are motor sailing, we've got the main up but there's only 9.4 knots of wind and I'm perfectly comfortable with that. We've got a long way to go and the boat's not tested so this is all just shaked out really. So we're giving the engine a good run for the first time in a long time, no bad thing. You can drink out of my purple bottle if you want. It's a winch handle mate. It's only a little sail. And we just need a slider for that bottom one on the foot. Along the boom. Yeah and then it'll be fine. That's all right, it's okay. That's better. Seven knots over ground. How are you feeling? Yeah fine. Good. Excellent, it's going well. Yeah. So far so good. So far so good. The engine's off and we're under full sail. We've got the big jenny up, the main mizzen and we are doing, well look at that, 8.68 knots. Between eight, seven and a half and eight and a half knots. And there's about 10 knots of wind speed and I'm losing my course because I'm not concentrating. So there we go. So we are sailing, sailing, sailing. What's this headland here? Salken. All right, so there you go. We're sailing past Salken. Absolutely fantastic. We're all set up. All set up with the dinghy on the foredeck in case we need it. Lovely smooth sea state. One hand for me, one hand for the boat. Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely steaming along. 9.6 knots. 9.6 knots guys. Under full sail in nine knots of wind. Anybody that says these boats don't sail in light winds, they're wrong. Absolutely wrong. This is just incredible. Yeah. Oh you won't get that boat to move in less than 20 knots of wind. Rubbish. Rubbish. I shall prove it to you. Eleven and a half knots of wind, nine knots of boat speed. Look at that. Nine knots in ten, without even trying. And that's with old, that's with old sails. Hello precision sails. That's with old sails that are way past their best. There's actually a tear in the top of that sail. I was putting out the other day and I noticed there's actually like a proper, a proper tear in the sail. So on this trip back, if it does blow up nasty, we're not going out. We're not going to risk it. We're just going to sit tight and watch a film. It's just such a good shape, isn't it? A cup of tea. Can you just sit quiet? Absolutely quiet. That's Salkham, is it? Salkham. All right, okay. Yeah. Salkham, there you go. Salkham. You are allowed to talk on camera Mark. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm Hi Jack. Hiya. How's it going? You still feeling a bit icky? No, I feel a lot better. He's got some fists out now. You just get quite a perspective of you sat there with the, you're going fast. Yeah. This is where you get a perspective of speed. Yeah. We've got the engine back on about 17 nautical miles to go. 15.4. 15.4. So the sun's just going down now. We're in Fowey. Yeah. Eight and a half hours later. Thanks very much Mike for helping a lot of it. Yeah. And what we were doing, over nine knots under sail. We got 10 knots at one point. The tide was with us. Yeah. With a running tide. So it's a bit cheaty. Yeah. There wasn't a lot of wind, but we still managed to get two and a half hours of sailing without the motor. And we're just looking tomorrow, looking at Falmouth. No, Newlyn tomorrow. So around the Lizard. But it's blooming freezing. It's one degree. It is. It's absolutely freezing. And then as we were coming in, it was pitch black. There's no point filming it. But as we were coming in, the RNLI lads were out in their rib doing a bit of practicing. So they guided us straight in onto the RNLI pontoon. So we've got power and everything. Magic. So thank you. Thank you very much Fowey RNLI. See you in the morning guys. So thanks very, very much for watching guys. I really hope you enjoyed the episode. As you can see, we are back in Wales. There's a lot of interesting and exciting episodes coming up all about the journey, but you'll have to watch the next few episodes to see that. But it's fantastic because Ocean Melody is now up in Wales in our home marina, just a stone's throw from Steel Melody, so work on Steel Melody can resume. And that's really good that we've got a few episodes already kind of shot and edited to give us a bit of breathing space. And the reason that that's good is because last week we had a bit of a shock. The weekend, as we were releasing last week's episode to our patrons, we always release the episode at the weekend for patrons and then on the Wednesday to the public. But during the weekend, Melissa went into early labour, which is a bit scary because she's only 28 weeks pregnant, or was then, she's 29 now. And she's been in hospital all week pretty, pretty poorly if I'm honest. She's doing well and she's doing okay and we don't have a baby as yet. So they've given her some medicine to help the baby's lungs develop and they've given her some medicine to help slow the contractions and that seems to be doing the trick at the moment. But we'll have to see how things pan out over the next few days. So a lot of you are going to say, oh you should put the YouTube channel on hold for a while and we can kind of, we've got a bit of breathing space as I say because we've got a few episodes already shot and edited, so we're a few weeks ahead. But bear in mind YouTube is now our livelihood, we're in the transition period between landlife and normal jobs and being full-time YouTubers and sailing full-time. So it's a bit like being self-employed, if you don't work you don't get paid. But if a baby comes along that changes things very quickly doesn't it. However Melissa's doing really well, no baby so far and things should be okay. In the meantime, really hope you enjoyed the episode. There's some really exciting episodes coming up of the rest of the journey and there'll be lots more episodes coming up of us working on Steel Melody. So take care guys, look after yourselves and see you next week.