Memories of ships that pass in the night

We had a wonderful day of R&R on the Ile d’Ouessant after the night passage – sunshine, scenery and local crepes and cidre. Since then the wind has continued to be conspicuous by its absence so yesterday we motored through the infamous Raz de Sein (where tides run at up to 6 knots) to overnight at Ste Evette near Audierne and then today we've consumed more diesel on a 30 miles passage of rock-hopping round to Loctudy.

The rocking and rolling of the sail from Falmouth already seems like a distant memory but here are a couple of photos from it.

If you’ve never experienced huge ship sailing just half a mile away from you in an otherwise empty and dark sea, we can tell you it’s something you never get comfortable with. However the AIS system that we have on board decodes their automatic transmissions to tell us the ship’s name, size, callsign, speed, heading and final destination. More importantly it does a quick bit of maths, having consulted our on-board GPS, to tell us our CPA (closest point of approach) so that we can focus on any worryingly close vessels.

These photos show a tanker and a passenger ferry from last night and they illustrate the difficulty of doing hand-held long exposure photos on a rolling yacht!

This evening we'll study the weather forecasts again and decide what to do. We need to make the break for Spain before the weather goes all wrong and gives us gales and headwinds but, on the other hand, we don't want to motor for 50 hours!!