It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Spring day today with a HUGE tide.

Barry, Roger Chandler and I decided it was a fine day to paddle 22 nautical miles around Holy island.

I’m sure many people don’t know that the town and harbour of Holyhead is actually on an island, to the west of the island of Anglesey. It would be easy not to notice this as you drive to Holyhead because 2 bridges connect Holy island to the rest of Anglesey.  As you drive over ‘Four Mile Bridge’ or ‘Stanley embankment’ the inland sea looks more like a lake, but actually the tide flies through these 2 bridges in both directions every day. The waves formed by the narrow gush of water are often paddling destinations in their own right, but today we were trying to pass through the bridges close to slack water – especially Stanley embankment where a nasty stopper forms at full flow on spring tides.

We started from Rhoscolyn at 11am and paddled south to the entrance to Cymyran Strait which leads to 4 mile bridge. Loads of birds make their home on the islands here and we spotted goosander, curlew, oyster catchers, geese and lots more. We ferry glided against the tide for a couple of miles before reaching the bridge and finding there was only just room to paddle under it! Despite it being after high tide, the tide was still flowing in. A mile or so across the inland sea and we reached Stanley embankment. As we expected, the tide was still flowing inwards here quite strongly so we stopped for a bit of lunch. Within 20mins the flow had reversed and we rode the current out of the inland sea. A long paddle into the wind brought us to the end of Holyhead breakwater where the waiting ferries kindly stayed put in the harbour as we crossed the entrance. We we rewarded with an exciting bounce through North Stack & South Stack with the tide. Despite stopping for a brief play we reached Penrhyn Mawr before the tide turned against us  (just about) and continued on to Rhoscolyn. The tide at the Beacon was also just trickling against us and the landscape looked quite different from normal at close to low tide on a 10metre tide! When we landed almost exactly 5 hours after we left, we were greeted by an awful lot more beach. The tide which had been lapping almost onto the slipway at 11am, was several hundred metres away!! A long carry later, we finished off the rest of our food and felt very pleased with our lovely day out.  

One Response to “Holy island adventure”