Passing the Orkney Islands 30th June
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sat 30 Jun 2012 12:05
About 15 miles NW of the Orkneys. En route to skirt the north of the Shetlands. we are routing to the east of the dirrect great circle route in search of favourable wind.
Since yesterday's post about leaving Stornoway we haven't stopped moving although not moving very fast. The wind has either been non-existent, barely apparent or reasonably light and directly on the nose so Awelina's engine was on for nearly 24 hours albeit at low revs to keep fuel consumption down. A bit surprisingly light winds and good weather considering the barometer has been steady at 986mb.
To compensate for this however the wildlife has been exuberant - we have had different sized pods of Dolphins round the boat since leaving Troon but none as playful as the small pod of 3 who decided that we had to worth hanging about with for about 20 minutes. Some of the dolphins have been huge - Atlantic variety on checking "the yachtsman's naturalist". Equally spectacular have been the views of the north coast of Scotland - Stac Pollaidh, Quinaig and Foianven all definitely recognisable during what turned out to be a hot part of the passage. Bread making also occupied us for a while - this time the loaves came out looking like bread as well as smelling like it.
We slipped into watch-keeping at 8pm last night - 3 hours on 3 off and for my part (Fiona) I had a fabulous watch - the pink light of the sunset never really left the sky - but it got dark enough for stars and a misty moon over Cape Wrath. Add to that the fact that while the engine is running we can use the newly installed heat exchanger in the main cabin - so I chased away any cold and damp with the warmth below while checking progress on the charts. This was slow however motoring into the swell and I handed over to James at 1am (GMT) when we were just coming up to the Skua stack. One traditional Viking method of navigation was proven: you can smell the stack from several miles down-wind. It got quite foggy during the night, so we had to put the radar on.
At the moment we are sailing at last, at a magnificent 3 knots!