Good but Very Uncomfortable Progress

A very uncomfortable day yesterday with wind and sea building from the South with swell from West South West. I’d lowered the Main at dawn and we continued all day and night with just the jib and wind on the starboard beam. We were moving along mostly at around 4 knots but rolling wildly and being slapped with breaking waves quite often. The forecast blow of 30 knots arrived, pretty much as advertised in the early evening but we seemed to be coping with it fine so held course and kept the jib up. Hopefully the waves will die away a bit today. The wind’s already down to 12 ish knots.

I was reduced to eating tins, Yesterday, I had a tin of soup for lunch with a couple of rolls (part baked petit pain) and cooked some butternut and threw in a tin of steak for dinner. It was fine but uninspiring, a bit like forces ‘Rat Packs’.

The numbers were good yesterday we logged 108 miles noon to noon. We’ve currently 425 miles to go to Campbeltown. My weather forecasts show mostly Sly winds for the next few days with nothing too exciting so let’s hope that that it is accurate. I get the new one in about 20 minutes, they come in at 0715 and 1915 GMT daily.

It was very cloudy yesterday, the PV panels were hardly harvesting any amps, we had maybe one or two amps for about 6 hours but it wasn’t really enough to bring the batteries up significantly, however we still managed through the night, I’m hoping that we’ll get a lot more today, there are patches of blue around and the clouds look less thick. Will see, If I don’t get much I may have to start the engine for a short time, which’ll be the first time since we turned back that I’ll have needed to.