Indenting the coast just around the corner from Plymouth is the River Yealm. A deep channel cut into the forested hills, the river and it’s tributaries split the small villages of Newton Ferris and Noss Mayo.
Yealm is undeniably beautiful, and like many places on the southeast coast, it’s chock-full of boats. Everywhere that’s deep enough for a boat to float has a mooring buoy or floating dock placed there, with only a small channel winding between them to access the inner buoys. Because of the narrow channel and surfeit of boats, anchoring understandably isn’t allowed in the river.
We usually don’t consider Madrone to be a big boat, but there were only two buoys in the river with enough swinging room for her size. Luckily for us, there was plenty of swinging room, good wind protection, and excellent holding in the muddy sand bottom outside the entrance to the river for Madrone to anchor.
Regular readers will have heard it before, but one of the best parts of traveling by boat is meeting new people. Matt and Jean previously circumnavigated aboard their Beneteau 57 Superted V, and now that they’re back home they enjoy cruising the UK coast aboard their Starlight 35 named, not surprisingly, Superted VI. We first met them in the Isles of Scilly after they befriended us on the beach, and we were surprised to hear a hail of “Madrone” from them as we bobbed peacefully at anchor. We enjoyed a fantastic evening of dinner and drinks at the local sailing club, trading sailing stories.
