Making Better Progress

can’t believe that we’re onto day 5 already, particularly as we have only just left the Scillies astern. When we came up from Falmouth,after I’d bought her, with a couple of friends, Brian and Chris, we did the whole thing to Tighnabruaich in 3 days and that included a stop off in Bangor for a dinner party!

Yesterday was a far pleasanter day, We took the inside route at the Bishop rock, punching a strong tide, and continued South towards the Scillies, there is a bit of a junction for commercial shipping off Milford Haven and there were several ships in sight at one time but it soon became quieter.

I caught up on a fe w jobs and then had a G and T at sundown with dolphins for company, common dolphins, I think. Lovely. The sun had been out all day and running the electrics but didn’t seem to put a whole lot of extra charge into the batteries. The wind came around to, first the West and then the Northwest and we were able to point at the Canaries and sail along freely for the first time.

Dinner was the remains of the previous night’s chicken and leak rice stir fry the only cooking so far I’ve managed, I suspect today wont be good for it either as the forecast has rough or very rough for sea area Sole. During dinner the wind picked up and by 2100 we were doing 8+ knots which was great. My forecast only had 15 to 20 knots so I went to bed with full sail up but decided by 0100 it was time to reef a bit so I put 2 reefs in the main and genoa and we’ve been going like that since. I was vwry glad that I did because we had some strong gusts later, I’m still sailing with the reefs in and likely to be for a few days.

We’re making good speed still, probably about 7 on average and the weather shouldn’t change much today, if the forecast is to be believed.

I just heard that some friends are due in Madeira 6th to 8th October but, unfortunately, I’ll probably miss them as I need to be at LaPalma from the 8th to get back to work.

I washed the keyboard yesterday in fresh water and am drying it out on the engine at the moment, I did this last time too so suspect it may object to being treated so badly but I’m hoping that the b and n keys will come back to life, and that it will stop doing its annoying thing with the disappearing page but think that this is more likely a programme anomaly than a keyboard stuff up.

Wondering whether to pull something out of the freezer for tonight but will probably go with pasta and pesto for simplicity. Mandy’s cake is proving invaluable and many apologies to Sheena who made me a sticky toffee pud but I then left earlier than I had planned to without telling anyone and didn’t meet up with it, - it was nearly similar with the cake, luckily Colin rang to ask if I was at home for a cake delivery when I was heading to Rothesay, passing the Burnt Isles so went to a mooring and rowed ashore at Colintraive where Colin met me with the cake.

Now the page has disappeared behind the virtual keyboard and I can no longer see what I am writing so will stop for now.