Today was a great day. Busy, varied and cloudless.

We weighed anchor from Porthcressa at 7.30am and headed up to Bryher, planning to anchor in Green Bay which is a drying bay.

It was after high tide and taking the direct route we knew we were crossing drying banks on a falling tide. Its a great reassurance knowing that we’ve almost 2m of safety margin in which we can pull up the keel, and in the worse case we’d dry out safely. In fact we did touch the bottom once and had to lift the keel a bit - the only annoyance being that as our main control by the helm for that is faulty I had to go down below to the first emergency control. At least that one is still powered and I didn’t need to go to the third resort of manually pumping the hydraulics to raise the keel.

We hurried on as the tide was falling rapidly, and once in Green Bay we anchored and waited - not very long - for her to settle on the bottom. Only about 30 minutes later we could walk around the boat taking a brush to the dirt and weed on the waterline.

First off we walked around Bryher. Amazing views from all sides - pictures speak louder than words. We briefly stopped at what must be one of the most picturesque artist studios in the country - belonging to Richard Pearce.

By low tide we were back at the boat, and then as it was springs were able to make a quick dash on foot across to Tresco and back. We’d left it a bit late to decide to do that, so were nearly wading on the way back as the tide was rising quite quickly.

We then sampled a (half) pint at the … whilst waiting for the water to come back to the boat, before putting the outboard on the dingy and heading across to Tresco properly. We didn’t quite walk around Tresco, but did walk diagonally across to … and back. In fact we walked further as their tourist map has an annoying habit of excluding several major pathways - particularly those with dead ends. Finished up with a taster at the New Inn on Tresco.