Interruption in transmission

Mor Toad / Moy Toad
David and Jocelyn Fawcett
Thu 26 Oct 2017 16:02
Although we arrived in Malta a week ago and on our first day here we did have a pretty good look round Valetta which I will write about later plans got slightly changed. We made an unscheduled return to the UK to see the family and David did a quick trip to Oslo as well on the Sunday evening ‘all to do with giving some advice on a railway tunnel’. He returned to Malta Monday evening via Brussels and I returned Tuesday morning from London so we are now back on track on the boat ready to complete the trip. Andrew stayed on the boat until the Monday - great to come back to a clean boat. Thanks. He also saw the start of the Middle Sea Race on the Saturday. We have been watching this on a Yellow Brick App.

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They got off to a reasonable start 100 plus boats but the wind died as they headed north to Sicily the route we had just come and many of them struggled to get through the Straits of Messina but once round the corner and heading for the Aeolian Islands around Stromboli things changed and owing to The Mistral a northerly wind they had huge gales ( jolly glad I wasn’t out sailing !) and many of the boats retired however the big boys - Rambler, Hugo Boss and Leopard plus several others made it round in 2.5 days or Just over , others followed and today Wednesday the last boat was heading home plus several of the retired boats who didn’t make it round Sicily and some didn’t even get through the Straits owing to no wind. How quickly it can change as we have discovered on this trip

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The strong northerly wind was due to cold air rushing down from the Alps down the Rhône Valley and out into the Med - The Mistral. Below is the snow I saw on the Alps flying back Tuesday .

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We shall be setting sail back to Sicily this coming Sunday hoping this is a period of calm before more windy weather however it would seem there might be quite a swell out there so potentially not the quiet crossing we had coming over.



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