Monday 21^st June

Immigration kindly let two hard working female officers work through the early hours of the morning to hand back our passports, which in our case was not until 2.00am. We all went to bed and at 5.30 am we back up and slipping our lines and heading out into the Med towards Port Said, Egypt.

The weather gods smiled on us today and we were soon bounding along with a gentle northerly breeze to take us on our way. 15 miles out we were greeted by the Israeli navy who checked our details and wished us a safe journey.

As we turned southwards on our new course from the 15 mile mark, the wind was behind us and so we set the twins (the twin downwind headsails) and for a while they set quite well, but the wind infuriatingly was not quite fully behind us and it became harder and harder to keep them filled. Gradually the wind died away and by 11.00 am we were motor sailing, but things got better as the wind increased again and came round to fine off the starboard bow and so we set the cutter rig which was a tremendous success again and we were soon cutting through the smooth sea under a VERY hot sun at 7 knots in barely 9 knots of true breeze.

Around 2.00 pm the wind veered round to the beam and the cutter rig no longer did the job and so we furled the staysail and just ran on the ‘twins’  lying together as a single headsail. This was fine but once the wind dropped to 10 knots we had no option than to complete our use of the entire sail wardrobe and raised Hyacinth (the Gennaker). A loud bang which turned out to be an expensive snatch block pulling open, was the only setback and we were soon back barrelling along at 7 knots which was very satisfying.

The wind direction gradually made it impossible to continue flying Hyacinth and it was around 5.00 pm that we had to restart the engine to help us along under a conventional rig. The temperature remained high all day and into the evening and by 9.00 pm it was still 29 degrees with 75% humidity.

It was at this point that we approached a huge gas platform and wisely took a route well to the south although this was made a bit tricky by a big fleet of fishing boats. Suddenly out of the pitch black we spotted a big unlit mooring buoy for the support vessels which we missed by less than 20 feet and were very lucky that it had not been on our exact track. Sarah immediately radioed all the boats behind us to warn them and give its exact position to the south of the rig, which was gratefully received by them all, but sadly ‘Walkabout Too’ (you guess the nationality from the name) choose to give this obstruction a very wide berth and went right to the north of the rig and steamed straight into a duplicate buoy out there! This has done very serious damage to their bows and at this time we are still unsure what their next step will be, but at least the hole was above the waterline.

The next excitement was another enormous fleet of very large and badly lit fishing boats and for the next three hours Serafina weaved her way through this mass of fast moving, unpredictable and impossibly badly lit vessels. By some extraordinary quirk of fate or whatever, our radar which has been out of action for several weeks now, quite spontaneously came to life and allowed us to plot our way through this mass, but not without a lot of worry and angst. I should come clean at this stage and admit that the watch system on Serafina meant that Sarah, Trevor and Lesley between them carried the day as I was off watch and sound asleep throughout the full three hours of all this excitement.

Certainly the day rated as one of the best day’s sailing we have had in a long time and it was very satisfying using all the sails in their various configurations so successfully.