Sunday 15th July. Eidembukta to Eidembukta
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sun 15 Jul 2012 18:35
It's St Swithin's day, and we hear that all in Cambridge are on flood alert with the river very high, but when we woke here it was still a beautiful day; sunny and quite warm, ~17 degrees, so James contemplated a swim, but had a bath in the cockpit instead! We then had a run ashore. Since the beach is a large flat area with
nobody around we decided to try the rifle, and chose Hannah to fire it since
she'd never fired one before. It worked fine, and we could hear the echo
bounce around the mountains for some time. James then fired one round of the
Verey pistol so we could get an idea of the distance the maroon goes before
exploding: which turns out to be about 50m.
The wind at this time being from the ENE we decided it was perfect for
making passage NNW to go towards Ny Alesund, and set off. However within an
hour it had changed back to due N, and increased to F5 We tacked for a
couple of hours, but since N5 agreed with the forecast sent by Elisabeth,
with no sign of a change of direction anytime soon, we decided to turn back
to Eidembukta. This is because where we were aiming - the passage out of the sound, Forlands
Revet - is vey shallow, only 3.5m, and is open to the north with very strong
tides of around 4 knots. Such a situation would be extremely rough and
indeed dangerous to go through with tide against wind, and impossible to get
through if the tide was with the wind and thus against us. Hence we decided to leave it for another
day. There is no anchorage sheltered from the north closer to Forlands Revet
than Eidembukta, which is 30 odd miles away.
The day was enhanced by Peter making a batch of bread and Fiona baking a
cake for the evening. We've roasted our last lamb joint and will be creative
with it in the kitchen this evening.
We could hear Jon on 14MHz quite clearly this evening. It seems the further north we go the better the propagation at that frequency, but it seems he couldn't hear us reply which was disappointing.