We originally planned on heading to Falmouth on Day 6, but ended up in Saltash instead avoiding some weather.

This was the first day that we experimented with weather routing using Fast Seas. You can read a bit about weather routing on Wikipedia, and can take a look at us chatting away about Fast Seas weather routing for Nic 38s on the owner forums.

We had 3 different routes planned with a set of parameters that we were at that point unsure of.

• Optimistic: Based on a theoretical good into wind angle of 45 degrees. This would take us around 8 hours.
• Pessimistic: Using a polar that we created from what we thought our actual sailing performance was from back in 2020 and 2021. This would take us around 18 hours.
• Middle ground: Based on a theoretical “normal” into wind angle of 60 degrees. This would take us around 12 hours.

So quite a range of times.

Each route took us right out into the channel, and with a single tack back all the way into Falmouth.

We went for it, planning for all 3 (or other eventualities), and the middle ground route ended up being roughly what we achieved. We were sailing on our closest point of sail the whole way with 1m swell from the west and 15-25 knts generally from the west.

In the image below you can see the middle route we managed, as well as 2 way points indicating the tack points of the other 2 routes.

Due to the single tack the voyage was quite pleasant 🙂

Instagram Post (June 27)

We headed to a marina, as we had a wedding to attend and wanted to keep Hannah safe and out of the way of others. We arrived in the evening so spent that evening on a visitor pontoon rafter up next to a very lovely yacht that had just come back from the Azores.

So many boats anchored up hiding away from the winds to come.

On day 9 we moved to the inner harbour of Port Pendennis Marina. Exciting day as we took Hannah over her first sil and through a swinging bridge.