First night passage completed, shipping avoided

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can send emails from anywhere at sea and, more importantly, get weather updates via the satellite phone. More of this later.

 

I'm writing this at 06.40BST and the sun has just risen over a grey and slightly lumpy sea. We're 25 miles from the French coast, just to the east of the Ushant Traffic Separation Scheme, one of the busiest shipping areas outside of the Dover Straights. Ships heading out of the English Channel and turning south for Spain and beyond must follow specific traffic lanes heading east and west. We're crossing their paths outside of the TSS but it's still pretty busy around here; during the night we had ships as close a half a mile.

 

We left Falmouth as planned at 18.00 and had a pretty brisk Force 6 blowing us out past the Lizard and into the channel. Unfortunately the wind was pretty much dead astern the whole way so the boat has been rolling and pitching quite a bit, making off-watch sleep rather difficult and the wind lessened as the night wore on. The full moon lit our path beautifully but also mean that we're in spring tides with the currents at their strongest. Our track on the chart describes a perfect S-shape as the channel tides took us west for 6 hours then east, with the current close to 2 knots at times. We've planned our passage so that when we arrive at Ushant, the south-going tide will scoot us along past Brest.

 

Our new friends Peter and Heidi in Stormvogel are not far behind; the boats have been pretty-evenly matched for speed but we've eked out a 4 mile lead (I know it's not a race but....). It's been good to have another boat for company.

 

So, planning ahead. I've just downloaded the latest GRIB files (gridded binary; a neat way of transmitting a lot of weather information as economical binary, which is then translated in the pc into a map showing wind arrows for 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours ahead). What our forecast shows is that the winds in Biscay are going to be pretty light for the next couple of days but with a bit of localised strong easterly wind as we approach La Coruna. Maunie needs a decent bit of breeze to make her go so this suggest that we'll have to do a fair amount of motoring. I'll have a conference with the First Mate when she wakes up to decide if we go for it anyway or whether to stop in somewhere like Loctudy, south of Brest. we'll keep you posted!