UPDATE

Tripled
Thu 16 Jun 2011 16:11
Well after James and I had a lovely sedate shift, it all kicked off at 4am. My first thought as the boat heeled right over and I fell from one side of bed to the other was "what is Andy doing now?!" - he is always doing something to make sleep more uncomfortable on his shifts! It turned out that what had happened was a huge squall which increased the wind strength from 6 knots to 32 knots in about a minute. After the squall had passed, the wind stayed up at 25 plus knots so it seemed time to reassess our Salcombe plan.
Mum and Andy looked at the grib files and at the shipping forecast - it seemed that we would be fine to enter Salcombe, and safe enough to leave, however that would mean another night at sea at potentially 30+ knots of wind. They debated crepes V safety for quite a while until safety won out by a narrow margin.
So the plan was made to sail on to Weymouth - only a day sail from Emsworth and with easier transport links than Salcombe for Andy to get back to work if we were to get stuck. By midday, however, we had made such good progress with a strong tide with us that we changed our minds and headed for Yarmouth.
With 20+ knots of wind, often gusting 30+, we were making extremely good speed over the water. However, rounding Portland we had 4 knots of tide against us which continued for quite a while - 4 knots of tide against 25 knots of wind makes for very rough seas!! Also so depressing to be sailing at 8 knots but barely making 4 over the ground.
Our ETA in Yarmouth is around 9pm, maybe sooner once the tide turns. We now only have 1.5kts of current against us. We can have a late fish and chip dinner, a safe night in a marina, and then still get to Emsworth for around lunch time tomorrow!!

Our position at 1715BST is 50:31.4N 002:02.3W.

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