David has plotted a course on the computer to Dublin, 590nm away. Our grib file is showing headwinds by the time we reach that latitude so a couple of days in Howth just south of Dublin may be on the cards but we are keeping our options open and ideally would like to complete the passage in one hop. The alarm was set for 6.45am but we cheated having an extra five minutes. The mornings and nights are cold so I don’t leap out of my warm bunk with the quite the same enthusiasm. We are almost looking forward to putting on our central heating. We left just after 8am, Emilia and Pinta already away. The skies were still overcast but at least the wind had fallen away overnight. We motorsailed until a useable breeze came up from the south west. It turned into the most lovely sailing day, blue skies, sunshine, steady force four to five winds on the beam. It doesn’t get much better than this. The seas are quite lumpy but one would expect that after four days of big winds. Donald plays with the sails with a tweak here, and a tweak there. He is great at sail trim and every point of a knot of boat speed counts. Oh, but it is cold. Every day I seem to have to add another layer. David cheerfully reminds us that next week is mid summer’s night after which the nights will start to close in.
Today, Sunday, there is just no wind at all and we have been motorsailing all day. It died away around 5am but we had at least covered 162 nm under full sail. What a dreich drab day but we all had extra sleep and the swell has died right down making life easier down below. We spent our watches dodging ships, there must have been dozens. It rained almost the entire day. We thought we were going to bring the sunshine home with us but it appears it could be the other way round. We hear Scotland is enjoying some great weather. We have kept the morning and evening SSB radio net going and everyone else heading north has run out of the wind. At 10 pm we were over the continental shelf the depths having risen sharply from over 3500 metres to just over 100 metres but with flat seas we would never have noticed.