Welcome to the Maunie of Ardwall blog

This is the blog of Maunie of Ardwall. After a six-year adventure sailing from Dartmouth to Australia, we are now back in Britain.

Saturday 13 October 2012

Well, perhaps just one more day in Nazare!

We're beginning to feel like permanent rsidents here! Having got the boat (and ourselves) all ready last night for departure this morning, we got up early this morning to do a check of the updated forecast.

Unfortunately the outlook has changed and the Grib files shows a whole lot of no wind for the next 36 hours:

The Grib files are clever wind and pressure forecasts which show the wind direction and speed as arrows (the 'feathers' of the arrow show an indication of the windspeed and they are colour coded too - blue is light and red windier). The clever bit is that we can access a huge amount of data for specific areas of the sea via the satellite phone without the files being expensively large. As you can see from this forecast (for midday today), we have very light winds and from all sorts of directions and, sure enough it's millpond calm here now but we can hear the surf pounding on the beach outside the harbour so to go now would involve motoring and rolling - an unpleasant combination.

So, we're here for another night and hope that the forecast for better winds tomorrow turns out to be more accurate than the one we had yesterday! So, more boat jobs followed by a cheeky beer or two at lunchtime seems to be the revised plan. Hey, ho! 

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