Sunday 8th November: past Finisterre and on course for the Canaries
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sun 8 Nov 2015 20:16
It's now 8pm and Fiona has just started her first solo night watch and James is about to go to bed until 11 pm when he takes over. We passed the latitude of Finisterre about an hour ago and could see its light but not the land. We are about 7 miles offshore anyway.
We spent all day tacking in benign conditions, sometimes accompanied by dolphins, moving rather slowly round the headlands but all of it under sail until about 10 minutes ago when the wind went from southerly to westerly, which frees us, but also dies away to only F2 so rather than do only 2.5 knots we're gong to motor for a while. The GRIB files predict that it will remain fairly light over night but hopefully we'll be sailing again by dawn. Excitements were fairly few as the visibility was not that brilliant and we saw little of the coast but we did cross paths with a Dutch 3-masted tall ship going NE and so on a dead run. She had all the sails set but was going only about 6 knots and rolling slowly: it didn't look that pleasant aboard but was a magnificent sight.