With a brief weather window opening up to sail to Ireland on Saturday, this will be our last day on the Scillies, but already, we want to come back to explore some more.

We had hoped to book ahead into Kinsale, but there is the Round Ireland Race event on all week….just our luck. The harbour master is not totally committed as he makes us laugh, describing it as just an excuse for a week long piss up.

So Cork it will have to be.

But for now we head back to the main quay and pick up a little boat for a trip to Tresco, and St Agnes and Gugh. The day is incredibly humid and the thick fog comes and goes across the islands…

We land on Tresco  and head off past the helipad for the gardens.

Actually the scillies have had quite a chequered history. Subsistence farming and fishing was the norm, but they were badly affected by the civil war with Tresco itself changing hands several times. The nappleonic wars also worked against the islands with the result that by the middle of the ¹9th century, they had gone from subsistence to poverty. The entirety of the islands were leased from the Duchy by the Smith family and they made their home on Tresco. They built their house on the ruins of the old St Nicholas Abbey and were great plant collectors, resulting in the gardens as they are today….including red squirrels who have the place to themselves.

We meander across the island, but it feels a bit more ‘resorty’ than even St Mary’s.  There are a few vans, but otherwise they use what look like golf buggies to get around. On the other hand, there is also quite a bit of alternative lifestyle stuff going on…yoga, mindfulness etc.

Another indication of how Tresco compares to, say, St Martins is that on St Martins we had quiche and chips, while on Tresco it is all smashed avocado and olive oil drizzlers.

There are only 8 of us on the boat and being relatively small it can get in close to the rocks and shore. The skipper, Raif, takes us out to Minalto, which is uninhabited apart from hundreds of seabirds.  Guillemots, razorbills and Puffins sem to enjoy just bobbing around together…

A few seals watch us lazily, before we head off to St Agnes.

Today is the Scilly 60 ‘fun’ run, which as far as we can tell, involves running 60 k around several of the islands. We land on St Agnes just before 3 boatloads arrive to hare off for just 9 k here then back on for the final leg. Us…..we give them a jolly good cheer in between mouthfuls of the wonderful St Agnes ice cream.

The little primary school had 4 children up to last year, but ‘the twins have now left leaving just two. We wonder if eventually St Agnes with it’s population of just 84 will go the way of Sansom and the other now deserted islands.  Controversially, we wonder if there may be folk from less tenable parts of the world who would jump at the chance to revive places like this…..just wondering….

There is just a small causeway of sand between St Agnes and Gugh, so we ‘tick off’ another island…

Tomorrow we plan to trundle over to Cork, so we spend some time planning the passage….roughly 24 hours, and equally roughly 6 tides, which more or less cancel themselves out across the Celtic Sea.