16th July (again, mistake yesterday!)

Having motored all night it was a grey, wet morning. I had a cup of tea and was wondering if we’d have to motor for most of the day. However as I was sitting looking at the forecast a light breeze picked up, just a few knots, but as it was from the North East the apparent breeze picked up as we headed North. We sailed on with, possibly, a front going through at coffee time with the wind veering and some rain arriving. After this the wind backed a little again but not all the way and we mostly sailed North with slightly too much West in it so we got closer to the complicated rocky bits on our port side.  I had about 55 miles to go to my first planned anchorage in Fifang Sorviken and didn’t want to arrive in the middle of the night so when the wind died at lunchtime we just drifted for some time.

I made ‘brown soup’ for lunch - a family recipe of my Father’s nicely described in ‘Trawling for Eagles’. It’s essentially yesterdays leftovers mixed up with any vegetables, or anything really, that needs eating,  and preferably whizzed up but as I don’t have a whizzer aboard just did what I could with a potato masher. People react to it differently, possibly with the majority falling on the side of thinking it’s not really very nice. Fine for we Hamiltons ‘though.

A breeze picked up just after 1600 from the NE again and we carried on getting closer to the lee shore as tacking would have us not really closing the next waypoint. By the time I’d had fish fingers and rice for dinner we were getting relatively close to the complicated bits on the charts but I was still reluctant to tack as we were making good distance to the North. We still had 5 miles leeway to leeward so I set the alarm for 40 minutes and went to sleep for a bit, a couple of times actually as we were doing fine. I ended up going in amongst the complicated bits for a little to eek out more distance before the wind backed at which point it was good to tack. Having tacked and now heading into safe water I changed to setting the alarm for an hour at a time.

Around dawn we had passed some ships at anchor with one more up ahead at about 5 miles on the AIS, we were doing more than 6 knots at times now with 15 knots of breeze so I set the alarm for 40 minutes and went to sleep. The AIS alarm woke me up after about half an hour. It turned out that there was another ship just ahead of me which hadn’t been transmitting, or possibly I hadn’t noticed, at about a mile at anchor. It was lucky that the alarm did wake me as I suspect we’d have run into it otherwise.

We’re now peacefully  at anchor in Fifang  which is looking good but quite full, and I’m going for some sleep.