Day 31-34: Biscay, from France to Spain

Day 31-34: Biscay, from France to Spain

Biscay was the biggest crossing in the first months of the trip. As the crow flies the bay is around 300 nautical miles wide. Our channel crossing from the Isles of Scilly to Brest was closer to 100 nautical miles.

As the crossing was going to take a few days, the main task in the days and weeks ahead of setting off was finding a weather window that both provided wind for sailing and a bit of comfort too (not too much swell).

The window we were aiming for primarily had a north or northwesterly wind around 10 to 20 knots with 1.2 to 1.7m swell, but also had a high pressure passing through the bay around the evening of day 33 which would give us a big lull before some easterly wind to finally bring us to A Coruna, Spain.

We used Fast Seas weather routing to come up with the initial route, and we used our Garmin InReach throughout the crossing to update this weather routing, and also to get weather updates. The route remained mostly the same throughout the crossing, although we ended up crossing in around 20 hours less than the initially predicted 3 days 12 hours. (Very satisfying).

Throughout the crossing, we literally saw hundreds of dolphins, too many to count, in 10s of different pods throughout the various days.

As we were far ahead of schedule when making landfall we got to our anchorage at around 3am and anchored in the dark.

Waking up around noon the next day, according to the plan we would still be sailing, but instead, we headed to the beach to relax.