Cold, damp and miserable
Roryhamilton
Thu 27 Jun 2019 08:07
Making around 5 knots but around 30 degrees off the required course :-(
We’re now around 6NM ahead of Fair Isle but we heard Sea Horse on the VHF radio last night - she sounded close - so we’re worried that with all our concentration on Fair Isle we’ve taken our eye of the competition astern and they may have sneaked past us?
It’s a pretty grim morning - dreich as we’d say in Scotland. Cold, damp an d miserable and unfortunately the cabin is getting a bit like that too see we’ll have to doing a lot of venting and drying in Falmouth. We can’t b believe this is midsummer! Feels like an a wet October weekend on the west coast of Scotland. Our vision of a down wind sail in fine sunshine while sipping on gin and tonics has been well and truly given a reality check! I don’t think the diesel heater - we call him dragon - has ever had so much use. I think we went from Largs to the Channel Islands via Spain an d France this time last year without using him once.
During the night a fishing vessel called us and told us that he had laid a huge line miles long ands without lights and that we were heading straight.for it. He didn’t speak much English so very difficult to understand but we had to tack away which probably lost us around 20 minutes. We also spent a while becalmed which was very strange since our forecast was showing a steady 15 knot easterly breeze. The weather yesterday didn’t resemble the forecast at all so we’ve lost a lot of confidence in our weather information.
Thanks to Liz (Mark’s mum) for the message and thanks to the update from Angus letting us know that Ophen Maverick now in the lead. In case you were wondering why she wasn’t always in lead even though she’s ahead, its because she has a faster handicap due to the very fancy mast, rigging and sails that Mark Slats put on for the Golden Globe race; therefore she has to give most the other class 4 boats a bit of time.
All the best from Mark and Rory :-)