Day 121 - Leg 6 Day 12 at Sea 'Onwards to Biscay'
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Fri 23 Oct 2015 14:37
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After a great dinner in Cascais, we woke up the next day
with a pile of jobs to do including patching the genoa, dry out various lockers,
general engine and boat checks and provisioning. It would have been easy
to stay another day, but Biscay beckons and there appears to be a good weather
window.
We finished the main jobs and slipped the lines at
14.00. As we are now pretty much a motorboat, we are not concerned about
all this tacking and gybing malarkey. If the wind is in the right
direction we will sail, if not we will motor. There is a weather window
across Biscay followed by some pretty evil looking winds and possible 10 metre
waves. If we reach the north west corner of Spain by early Friday morning
and head straight for the north west corner of France, aiming to arrive there by
Sunday morning, we should, hopefully, beat the storm. If we delay by a
day, we would probably be stuck in Spain for a week or more.
As well as doing our own weather forecasting,
we have also been using a weather forecaster since the Cape Verdes.
The main reason for this is to give us a second opinion, particularly on the
next stretch. I had arranged to email our relevant details (position, boat
speed ,wind speed & direction etc) on Thursday evening and he would give us
a weather forecast and suggested routing across Biscay.
So we motored hard up the coast into a fairly mild swell
and light winds. Peter's forecast on Thursday evening looked
positive, provided that we continued without stopping. We had arrived at
the drop off point for Biscay on time, so I downloaded the grib files
at 06.00 on Friday morning which confirmed the forecast and off we set.
If things go to plan, we should arrive at the start of
the English Channel on Sunday morning, at least 12 hours before the weather
turns. We should get a pretty strong wind behind us along the Chanel
towards Southampton and hope to arrive there Monday afternoon or Tuesday
morning.
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