Kipper Sailing

We're glad to leave Lowestoft. The Royal Norfolk and Suffolk YC is extremely pleasant, with very welcoming members, but it's a gated oasis amongst a pretty grim town. Apart from a quick trip to Asda yesterday, we didn't venture out at all.

The astute amongst you might notice that we didn't start until around 0850 this morning, whereas we finished at 0050 Tuesday morning. This might look daft but the tide runs at 2.5kts north, south off Lowestoft and with very little wind overnight we decided to stay in the marina rather than anchoring outside. Of course this means that we've lost all our time against Resolute, Knight's Challenge and Summer Bird but SB rates higher than us and KC rates the same. Resolute rates a lot less and had already overtaken us on corrected time on the last leg. Hey Ho!

We now have a new propeller. Darlgow certainly offer excellent customer service. When we notified them of the problem on Tuesday morning, the immediately started manufacturing a new prop and then brought it up, all the way to Lowestoft, a 5 hour drive from their factory in Wareham, to fit it yesterday afternoon. They even paid for the lift. A big thank you to Chris in particular.

Our cooker is also mended. Most of you probably know that, very unusually, Kipper has a diesel cooker. When it works, it works very well indeed and, of course, not having gas onboard, relieves us of a major worry regarding safety. However it's a complex bit of kit, incorporating multiple fans and PCBs, one of which failed on the last leg and, whilst we could still use it, it wouldn't run through its proper cool-down cycle which risked cracking the ceramic hob. Anyway, the local agent visited Kipper and replaced the small stove control panel and associated PCB and it's now working fine. Fingers crossed.

It's approximately 320 miles to the finish in Plymouth. If we average the same VMG as we did on the last leg, this should take us 4 days, so finishing on Monday, however the English Channel is made up of a series of tidal gates (Dunganess, Beachey Head, St Catherines Point, Anvil Point, Portland & Start Point). And that's once we get round North Foreland and through The Dover Straights. It all depends on what happens at these points. Inevitably it's a dead beat to North Foreland and the winds are forecast to veer westerly later and to stay in the west for the foreseeable future, so it's going to be a beat all the way. The wind speeds vary between about 5kts and maybe 12kts on the English side of The Channel and, perhaps, 15kts on the French side. If we're lucky we'll be able to maintain positive VMG all the way but, frankly it's unlikely and we may well find ourselves having to anchor a number of times to wait out a tide. That's what happened to many of the faster boats and, of course, they can make ground over an adverse tide more easily than we can. So we're just going to suck it and see. Ultimately, if progress is too slow, we might be forced to bail out as both of us have business commitments that can't be put off.