Leaving Shetland Sunday 1st July

Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sun 1 Jul 2012 16:00
60 27.42 N, 001 36.98 W

It appears the blog is not showing our daily position correctly; hopefully today's plot will show correctly. Apologies to all. Leaving Orkney to our starboard yesterday with variable winds of almost negligible strength we were swirled around in post gale lumpy seas until around 11pm, when the wind finally settled to a steady WNW force 4. As we'd been trying to sail all day and failing it was a pleasant change to be close reaching along in the dusk with the island of Foura to starboard and the Ve Skerries ahead.

Because of the amount of motoring we have already done and the chance of being becalmed we have decided to put into Shetland and refuel. The Hillswick hamlet was marked up in the Cruising Association Almanac as having Fuel, Engineers and a decent hotel. Arrived here at 6 am and dropped the hook James having done more than his fair share of watches since again Fiona pulled the best sail of the evening and the off-duty when it got slow and rather tedious... Getting fuel involved calling the hotel for pump opening times, emptying the spare fuel out of the jerry cans (thank you Peter for getting those) and then ferrying the empties ashore. The local shop opens at the same time as the local church service is scheduled today being Sunday. Services starting at midday we had time before refuelling to have a quick walk round a surprisingly thriving hamlet with a forge, a local artist and apparently a pub as well as the conspicuous hotel.

Back on board with our fuel we discovered that we'd used around 60 litres in the course of around 40 hours motoring. The stop was worth the effort. Now heading up the west
side of northern Shetland and hoping the forecast of force 5-7 WNW winds holds up to get us well on our way North.

To Alison Cripps from Fiona: Please wish your Mum happy birthday for me for
next week and go sing your heart out at the concert on the 7th.