Heading back to Sweden day 2 at sea

South Pacific Familyadventure 2008
Claes Brodin
Tue 14 Aug 2018 15:27
If today has been a pleasant day at sea, yesterday was a challenge.
We departed Tallinn 06.15 and came out to circumstances not expected from our forecasts(mainly Predictwind and Swedish SMHI).
The seastate was quite disturbed already in open sea outside Tallinn and when reaching the northwestern peninsula of Estonia the seastate deteriorated.
With winds of 28 knots in the nose the seastate was much worse than expected and Dora Mac and her crew were plowing slowly through 9 ft steep headseas with very short periods.
Maintaining a speed of 2,8-4,5 kts on 1600 rpm it was a slow torture. It didn´t get better from a confusing galewarning (w-nw 15-17m/s perhaps 20m/s later) from Tallinn Radio.
After a concluding talk on their trafficchannel we understood this was in the eastern part of the Finland Gulf.
Dora Mac behaved well though and reaching the central Baltic after midnight, things improved.
I realised as mentioned before that the Baltic sometimes generates horrendous seastate without very heavy windconditions. There have been some open sea sailraces (Baltic Race) where "only" 30 kts of wind created a vicious seatstate with damaged boats and even casualties among the participating crews as a consequnce.
28 kts of headwinds along the Atlantic coast of Portugal (northada) would create perhaps bigger waves but with much longer periods being less demanding.
Nevertheless at the moment all is well onboard and we estimate to make landfall around 21.00 hrs.

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