May 3, 2012
Cap boards….check Epoxy saturated cloth covering the whole mess and locking it in to the stringers and hull……check We are officially compliant with the new volume rule and have two functioning pilots! “The big off”, as they say, is scheduled for Friday afternoon or early evening. There is a good weather window for delivering the boat to Plymouth England, for the UK Fastnet race. It’s a 27…0 mile delivery in total. There is one tricky bit. It’s called the “Raz de Sein”. If you look on the map of France where the English channel meets the Bay of Biscay, there’s a hump of land that juts out to the West here. What you can’t see is the rocky finger outreach. There is a good 1 mile wide passage here through this area, but the tidal stream runs at 5-7 knots here depending on the time of day. I’ll be right just following a neap tide, so the tidal stream (current), will favour a little closer to the 5 knots….still. If I get there when the tide is head on, and I’m only in 10 knots of wind, I could be standing still. There is a good likelyhood that I will have to go around. This will add about 20 miles to my trip. It’s not the end of the world….just a few more miles. We’ll see what the tidal stream is running when I approach. I’ll just have to wait and see as the wind looks lite and shifty leading up to there. After that it’s just a simple multi lane highway crossing of the second busiest shipping lane in the world!
Diane
