A hard slog

19th Aug 2010


After watching the weather every couple of hours for the last few days, it has becoming clear that if we head to Lizard, we risk the potential of being stuck there for a week to 10 days. This of course would be less than fun as the anchorage is subject to significant bullets (intense wind gusts) and is without any supplies or services as the resort is completely off limits for grotty Yachties . This has led me to the ‘D’ to wait the opportunity and head south and that opportunity looks like today.

Heading off at dawn, we pushed out into 15-20 knot headwinds right in the nose. This had us motoring with about a 30o track offset to keep the main sail loaded and making only 3.5 knots. With 63 Nm to go this would result in 18 hrs of driving into wind and swell but the good news was that the forecast was for the wind to drop off as the day progressed and we travelled south and this is how things worked out. By about 13:00, the seas had settled quite a bit and the Yanmar was humming beautifully giving us around 5 kts and an ETA of sometime around 20:30 at low Isles.

Now going anywhere at 3.5 kts is a slow and arduous affair but becomes even more painful when a large ship ( or several in our case) travels past at some 14 kts with thousands of HP pushing it through all in its way. Even the flotsam that predominates this area, appears to be travelling faster than us!

Anyway, it all worked out probably better that I expected so all that was left was a night arrival in the crowded anchorage. This was tight, as anticipated and therefore didn’t really work out perfectly but I was too tired to move and thought I would worry about things later when the tide changed. This meant setting a 12:30 alarm and spending an hour or so on deck watching the swing on tide changes but all was well so I went back to the cabin, resigned to what we had.