Eight Days at Sea and what’s been happening?

 

Well, not a lot thankfully. The nights are getting longer and the layers worn at night in the sleeping bag are getting smaller, the beards are getting scruffier, and importantly we are getting closer to Home.

 

Since we left Greenland we have mostly had North Westerly winds allowing us to pole out our sails and enjoy good speeds both day and night with the wind behind us. With the exception of one day we have had a very comfortable 15-20 knots of breeze and that one day it got up to 38 knots which was testing, we lowered the main sail totally and were still creaming along at 7 knots with a half furled in no 2 jenny all on its own.The seas were also confused which added to the bedlam below as nothing stayed in the cupboards when they were opened and sleep was almost impossible.

The truth is so far we have been blessed with the weather and currently there are forecasted gales in almost all parts of the Irish coast except our little corner! Its all to do with an anticyclone built up in Iceland moving over Scotland and into the North SEA.

We have under 300 miles to go now and fingers crossed hope to get into Kinsale on Wednesday.

We are travelling on UTC time which means we need one more hour change to get onto Irish Summer time and this will do tonight.

 

Yesterday we celebrated two mile stones.

The Log on Mollihawk’s Shadow passed the 14,000 mile mark! that’s since 2007. And we clocked up 1,000 miles since we left Greenland. A bottle of Bubbly was broken out of Ship’s Stores and we celebrated the occasion with around 100 pilot whales who came to congratulate us and surf down the waves with us.

It was an amazing sight as they stayed with us for around an hour completely engulfing the boat. They arrived in such huge numbers and we could see them 3 or 4 waves back and almost close enough to touch.

A bit like the dolphin they cruise through the water and only surface for a second for air. But uniquely the Pilot Whale seems to enjoy bursting out of the crest of the wave torpedo like and then disappear.

We eventually ran out of film and spent the night emptying our memory cards by deleting all the shots where the whale eluded us and all that you see is spray but we did get a few good shots.