Happy to say we arrived without any major problems in Lymington yesterday late afternoon. We had a great welcome by Marie, Tom's parents, grand-parents and his sister. We will be here for the coming week emptying the boat and get her ready to be put on the hard.

Hope all our readers had fun watching our progress across the North Atlantic and the challenge getting into and half way through the English Channel. It was frustrating at times but the last few hours were very satisfying as we executed the potentially only strategy of adding to our distance by tacking to the South and back North. The entry into the Solent through the North Channel was not a major challenge and we were lucky enough to come into the Lymington Channel right behind a Isle of Wight ferry making the navigation through the narrow channel easy.

Thanks for the support to all.

Charles

Dreamcatcher - out

The day turned out to be much better than the start of it this morning. The tack South and back North are paying off big time as we expect to be at the entrance to the Needles at 3 p.m. local time. It will probably take us 3 - 4 hours up to Lymington from there depending on the strength of the ebb current that we will have. ETA now late this afternoon barren any unforeseen

Charles

Tom is happy - we are sailing and he is hand steering trying to get to 10 kn SOG! He managed 9.8 kn so far. Getting close. We did the only thing that made any sense to us given the conditions - we took a tack to the South under staysail and main with 3 reefs and shut the engine off. We have been doing rather well and in about 1 hour will tack back North for about 20 Nm which should put us near The Needles. Given the strong winds and direction we are likely to go through the North Channel rather than The Needles. Overall, things are looking up a bit but no firm ETA yet. I have put the YB tracker on 2 hours and will put it on 1 hour as we close in on the entrance to The Needles.

Charles

Just as we thought it could not get any worse the English Channel through another challenge at us and our ETA is totally up in the air. We are experiencing close to 2 kn of current against and 25 kn of wind on the nose. Needless to say we are at a standstill despite having the engine on and engaged. Totally impossible to predict our arrival time at this stage. I am hopeful that the current will change soon but the sea state might be problematic with 25 kn of wind going against the tidal current. To top it our fuel supply is getting low and it will be a bit of a nailbighter for the 2 of us. Do not expect a change to hourly up-date of the position for a while. Tom is totally frustrated with the lack of progress and is sleeping it off while I will try to make the boat go in the right direction while we wait for the situation to improve.

All else OK on board TWD - NE TWS - 25 - 30 kn COG - 65 deg SOG - 0 to 0.2 kn Baro - 1019 weather - fine with chance of rain ETA - not definable - sometime today we hope

Charles

For once I write this in the middle of the night as it is our last few hours at sea as we are less than 50 Nm from Lymington. We saw the Queen Mary 2 again around midnight. No contact this time which is understandable as there are so many boats around us. We also saw the cruise ship Deutschland a few minutes ago. The weather has not changed and Tom and myself are very happy that we are finally done with beating into these strong headwinds. We will switch the reporting for the Yellow Brick Tracker to 1 hour once we will be about 6 hours away as promised yesterday.

Right now we are off the Portland Bill in a very strong tidal current against and are hardly making any headway. This will change in about 3-4 hours time and we should be going quite fast then. Right now our speed is down to around 1 kn. So do not be alarmed if you see a very low number on the tracker for the last report! We expect to be in Lymington sometime around after 10 a.m. UK local time this morning.

All OK on board TWD - NE TWS - 18 kn COG - 340 deg SOG - 1.5 kn or less - increasing later Baro 1020 weather - clear sky ETA - about 10 a.m. UK time this morning - plus 2-4 hours do not expect earlier arrival

Charles