Position: 48:12:90N 10:12:00W

At noon today we crossed back over the continental shelf (that’s the shelf to keep your continentals on – right Mum?) and were back onto soundings once more!  The sun has been shining but the wind has been obstinately against us.  However, we’ve made good progress against it and had 190 miles to Falmouth by sunset.

In the evening, we picked up VHF signals from Cork, Shannon, CROSS Corsen and Falmouth radio, all about 200 miles away – exceptional range!  Must be the high pressure allowing the signals to bounce as normally range is around 30 miles.  It felt momentous to hear the very English tones of Falmouth MRCC after so long having not heard them.  We also got a DSC alarm from Corsen for some mayday relay for a boat near Brest.  I had forgotten what the DSC alarm was and it took me a while to work out where the alarm was coming from!

There is a lot of traffic now we are in the Western Approaches – fishing boats, laden tankers, etc and the handbearing compass and binoculars have been dusted off and pressed into service to keep an eye on everything nearby.  We’ve got the radar on standby in order to track potential collision candidates also.

We threw in a couple of tacks to try and keep our VMG (Velocity Made Good) towards Falmouth as high as possible, but it is frustrating as we now have tide as well as wind against us.  Oh well, hopefully we’ll get a push from the tide in a few hours.  We are going to be extremely close on fuel and I think we are going to have to turn the engine off and abandon ourselves to our fate at some point today.

Our plan (such as it is) is to call in to Falmouth to fill up with fuel, then pretty-much head straight on down-channel.  The forecast is for light Easterlys for the next few days so we are resigned to having to motor all the way down the Channel – frustrating but that is sailing / weather for you.  I think we will get into Falmouth sometime on Tuesday if we’re lucky.

That’s all for now.