This weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting the Isle of Man. For this trip, your choices are limited to the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company or various airlines which are completely impractical if you want to take the car and fairly expensive. With this in mind, I booked a return for two people from Liverpool to Douglas, a snip at a mere £42 per person for foot passengers plus bicycles travel free. More about bicycles later though.

Check-in at Liverpool is especially fun. No-one had made it in the slightest bit clear how passengers with bikes were supposed to check-in. For anybody thinking of doing it in future, you have to get your boarding pass from the check-in desk, then take your luggage over to the entrance to the foot-passenger lounge where it is X-rayed, abandon it to the baggage handlers, and go wait with your bike amongst the cars. Also note that the arrangements in Douglas are almost completely different to this.

Eventually it was time to get on board. The vessel on which I sailed out, Super Seacat III has the bikes loaded first, then cars, then foot passengers. Somehow I don't think the crew had been warned that there were somewhere in the region of 60 cyclists heading straight for them. The ferry is well equiped to deal with around 20-30 bikes and unless you happen to head across the same weekend as a large cycling event, you should be OK. Spare a thought for the old couple with touring bikes who quickly disappeared amongst the scrum of mountain bikers trying to make sure their pride and joy didn't fall over in high seas.

Finally, running a mere hour and 15 minutes late, we headed off for Douglas. The trip itself was thankfully uneventful; no major maritime disasters here, although the ride can be a bit bumpy. Facilities onboard are sparse with a shop that sells little trinkets from the Isle of Man (as well as Liverpool and Everton football memerobilia) and a restaurant selling overpriced food with an even longer queue than the bar. Popping out onto the open deck in the middle of the Irish Sea is highly recommended for anyone who hasn't been on a fast ferry before. At it's service speed of 38 knots it's quite impressive standing on the open deck, if you are able to stand up at all.

Heading back to Liverpool was complicated by different check-in arrangements. This time round, we needed to check-in with the cars, something that was only found out through word of mouth between the even larger number of cyclists that had decended on the 7am Monday morning crossing. This done we were given our boarding passes and had to wander inside to get rid of our baggage. The sailing to Liverpool used the smaller SeaCat Isle of Man, a vessel with a different order to load things in, leaving cyclists standing in the rain feeling cold, miserable and wet. This time the crew were even more surprised by the huge throng of cyclists but space was found and we set off on time. The bar was open but, apart from a rugby team on tour, no-one really felt like drinking at that time in the morning. The combination of a smaller vessel and rougher weather made for a rather choppy crossing, which took slightly longer than the scheduled 2.5 hours. The disappointment was evident in the Captain's voice when he annouced over the tannoy that we were "only" going at 29 knots.