Kipper Sailing

Spent the day tacking down the North Yorkshire coast, past places I've never been to, like Whitby and Filey. We'd heard that today was going to be the hottest day of the year so far and were please to find expected sea breezes adding to the SE gradient breeze close into the shore. Mind you, it might have been hot on land but it was still pretty chilly at sea. My shorts came out for a while, much to Nasher's amazement. I don't think he's sailed yet without his oilskin trousers and hat.

Once we got down to, just north of the, Humber Estuary we put a waypoint into the chartplotter on what, we call the “magic spot”. This is the spot, where according to the tidal atlas in Reeds, at approximately 4 hours before HW Dover, which is 0100 tomorrow morning the tide splits north and south and, if we can time it right, we'll catch and extra 3 hours of SE going tide. Whereas, if we miss it, we'll get mula'd by a NE stream. Too early to say yet.

Speaking of mula (or Muller, or however you spell it), it's fun speculating tomorrows headlines. “Mula'd” or “Mullered” are obvious choices. Or perhaps “Fab He Go”? I never warmed to the supercilious twat anyway.

Of course it's a shame England are out (again). There's little doubt that a good run would have been good for national morale and also for certain sections of the economy. But, on the other hand families and many employers would suffer, so it's probably swings and roundabouts.

This in turn takes me back to one of my, much earlier posts, I think I said that we needed some roundabouts. Well, we haven't sodin' had any. Bah!

New curry recipe. I tin Tesco Chicken Tikka, 1 tin Tesco Bombay Spuds, left over roast chicken. Microwave rice. It was bloody excellent. (Now a big fan of microwave rice.)

Around 90 miles to Lowestoft. VMG has been averaging about 3.5, so that still has us finishing sometime on Tuesday. We'd really rather not finish in the middle of the night as that mucks up the whole social side of the stopover. Any time from 0800 to 1800 would be fine.

Resolute's tracker stopped updating at 2200 on Saturday night. We wonder if they've bailed out to their home port of Scarborough. We wouldn't be surprised, they've already sailed all the way around and, with finishing within the time limit being a bit touch and go, I think that's what we'd do. Imagine sailing on, only to miss the limit and then having to sail all the way back?

We seem to be holding our own against Knight's Challenge and Summer Bird, although we've adopted a radically different strategy by going east into the coast. They've been tacking straight down the rumb-line. Time will tell.