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Dinghy Sailing in the Falkland Islands By Chris Harris Since I joined a couple of Yahoo groups concerned with dinghy sailing, boat building and micro cruising several people have asked me to wrote something about sailing in and around the Falkland Islands. I have a Wayfarer MK1a. It's pretty standard, but I have modified a roller furler, for the genoa, to allow roller reefing. The mainsail has slab reefing. I have added a bracket to carry the outboard motor. One of the local hazards is kelp, which shows up as oily calm looking patches on the water. It's guaranteed to catch any underwater appendages, you can't sail through it with your centre board and rudder down, and it can tangle and stop a small motor dead. But it also acts as a nice marker to tell you where the rocks are! The Falklands are in some ways ideal small boat cruising grounds, but not for the faint hearted, consisting of about 700 islands covering about 12,000 square miles with a coastline of about 4,000 miles. On the plus side there are thousands of miles of unspoilt coastline, with many sheltered creeks to layup for the night, lots of wildlife in the form of dolphins, seals, birds, orcas, and in the Autumn big whales. On the negative side is the climate and weather; never very warm and often windy, we usually get Force 6 or Force 7 for at least a couple of hours around midday every day int eh Summer, and we usually get gales on between 5 to 8 days a month. The nights are usually calm as the wind tends to increase in strength around 7am and drop about 5pm. The prevailing winds are Westerlies; north-west during the Summer and south-west during the Winter. The most spectacular scenery is around the Islands that lie to the far west of the group. Here you can see high cliffs, impressive stacks etc. But this is also the most dangerous area for small boats. Some interesting and safer areas for a small boat on the West are Port Philomel and the area inside of Pebble Island. Falkland Sound (between the two main islands) is a good place with a lot of islands and harbours to visit. The big sounds, Adventure Sound, Bay of Harbours, Choiseul Sound, and Berkeley Sound, on the east coast of East Falkland, along with Salvador Waters (the large inlet that opens from the North of East Falkland), offer some of the best small boat cruising potential. I live in Stanley, which is the most easterly point of East Falkland. Stanley Harbour and Port William are good places to sail a dinghy for a day trip, but really Stanley is very badly placed for access to the better small boat cruising grounds. For a small boat all of the good places are at least a day, or two days sailing, away so a whole weekend is wasted just getting from Stanley to somewhere interesting in time to turn around and come home with no time to explore. It is for this reason that I have been looking into dinghy cruising, micro cruising or trailer sailing. These days there is a reasonable road network (roads here would be classed as poor tracks in most developed countries) so it is possible to trailer a small boat to the cruising ground, spend a weekend or longer exploring, and trailer it back again. There are no marinas, or other facilities anywhere in the islands. Stanley has a port and a few buoys, and there is a military port at Mare Harbour (Choiseul Sound), apart from that some of the settlements have a jetty. For these reasons you have to be self-sufficient in your boat, whatever size it is! A fuller version of this article, including advice and links on reference materials, can be seen on Chris Harris's web site www.viking-house.com. Many thanks to Chris for allowing us to reproduce this article.
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