Tuesday 16 September 2008

Tall Ships sail from Falmouth

Sad to say that I didn't visit Falmouth last week where the town was hosting the preparations and start of the Tall Ship Race to Funchal in Madeira. It is a two stage race stopping in Portugal before crossing to Madeira. As I wasn't there to witness the spectacle it makes sense I think to put in a link here to an extensive feature about it on the BBC Cornwall website. I have to say that the Beeb normally excel on their websites - I find them very easy to navigate around and they generally have some useful links as well. Not so good from my point of view is the website of the Western Morning News, it seems to take for ever to load and when I get there I find it a bit of a miss-mash. It's partly what you are used to I suppose but the BBC sites to me are so user friendly.

Falmouth in my opinion is the perfect place for such an event. Certainly a number of nations were participating and by all accounts the town was a very happy and animated place during the course of the regatta. Estimates suggest that something like 130,000 people watched the start of the race and a good many of these were massed on the cliff at Pendennis Castle to watch the ships sail away. I think that if I had driven down there on Saturday I would have been tempted to go to the lovely Roseland Peninsula, do some walking with the aim of arriving at Zone Point or St Anthony Head to secure a vantage point. But anyway I didn't so no point in thinking about "might haves"! The fundamental thing here is that the whole event proved to be a terrific success.

Well done Falmouth!

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