Retrospective Forecasting

Picture is last night’s sunset. Not very inspiring but I’ve discovered that small pictures can be sent, I’m hoping to get more interesting ones, please bear with me.

It’s a beautiful morning this morning - day 9, clear blue sky but not much wind, there’s a new system coming our way, hopefully it’ll not be too horrible, due around Wednesday.

Yesterday we put the clocks back an hour to GMT (I can’t stand this UTC nonsense, one of the few things I don’t blame Tony Blair for, I think it’s the French not liking GMT because it reminds them of Trafalgar).

I had various sail options up and down yesterday, but there wasn’t enough wind for the Staysail on it’s own and it doesn’t work well in addition to the genoa. I saw, or think I may have because it didn’t hang around, a common Tern.

The batteries don’t seem as good as before, they’re only just managing to see us through the night now from a fullish charge whereas before it was not an issue as long as I didn’t run the autopilot. It may be that they have not been getting fully charged, we’ll see today because it’s looking like horizon to horizon sunshine.

Computers and Jock. They’re like cats, they know it’s me and start to do irritating things. My forecasting program had been working fine now it’s decided to accept the parameters I’ve asked it to provide, spend the half hour or whatever downloading something and then give me yesterdays forecast instead of a new one. Urghhh! I was a bit worried last night, I hadn’t noticed that the forecast that had come in hadn’t been updated, Ertan on Lazy Otter was worried about the low that’s coming in and I said it didn’t look too bad, then in the middle of the night after I’d been up tending the sails I noticed that the forecast said it was 18 hours old when it should only have been 6. Re downloading a few times it eventually condescended to give me the up to date one and it then looked like the gale coming up was going to be more playful than I’d indicated to Ertan, luckily the advice I’d given him on routeing was still the same. I’ve re read all the instructions on the thing but don’t think that I’ve done anything wrong. It’s a real pain having to download the weather several times before getting what I want although now at least I think I’m more aware of when it’s not given me a new one.

I lost an onion whilst cooking. I’d put two on the galley top, the boat took a roll / heave and they flew onto the sole. I found one straight away as it was rolling around, the other one had completely disappeared. I spent some time looking for it then thought I’d just get another but that seemed stupid. Turned out it seemed to have a bit of a penchant for crazy golf, it’d rolled across the sole, bounced up a ledge, hit a sloping deck piece under the chart table jumped up into the air and popped into a small cubby hole.

I think AJ are now ahead of us, well further West in any case, they are a lot further North so may not actually be closer to Newport but probably are, they certainly ought to be, however I’m hopeful that conditions may favour me later, I think they aren’t so good to windward, also they were ahead before and I ended up back ahead of them, possibly in the bad weather although I’m keen not to overpress poor Freya as I’m very keen to avoid failures as much as possible.