We woke up especially early today with the plan of getting to Vigo and a new marina early to prepare for our guests.
But looking out of the windows, we were met with walls of fog.
We waited a while, but set off in fog anyway with the fog horn at the ready, lights on and a lookout on the bow.
The fog continued to be patchy until we reached Vigo.
There are many ports in and around Vigo, and we went for the cheapest, that we could also book through the Navily app, to make things easy.
Guests
Warren and Daisy arrived in Porto last night, stayed in an AirBnb for the night and will be in Vigo after a little coach ride for noon and a short taxi trip.
The coach was €30 for both, and the taxi ride was only €12 + tip. Not bad considering the change of country due to our plans changing.
Soon after they arrived we headed to stock up with provisions for the coming week or so.
This trolly picture was either taken by Warren or Daisy, you pick, they both look the same
Relaxing was done and @wozzletron made a delicious grilled nectarine feta cheese Mediterranean salad for dinner, on the side of Kathryn’s fresh sourdough loaf for dinner, with a spot of wine.
Many more jobs were done in the morning, more shopping, stowing, cleaning, deck scrubbing, washing etc.
From Zoe
We made some friends on Instagram who we then also met in real life as they were moored just a few boats down. Introducing @sailingvesselzoe. Also planning on making their way toward Canada on their Hallberg Rassy 36 called Zoe. We should be continuing to sail around the same area for the next few weeks, so hopefully we will cross paths again.
To Nude
As we said yesterday, we are now aiming for Vigo for the 3rd of August (2 days time), so want to progress down the coast a little more.
We already looked at some anchorages a few days ago, so continued down to the south, and headed to the last on the list.
We both also managed to squeeze in some time for work during and just after the sail. (Adam will talk about the internet setup in a blog post soon)
We arrived at the anchorage surprisingly early given our track record for the last few hops. So we headed on to the beach (Praia de Barra).
After Adam doused the bed in the saloon in salt water, we needed to do some laundry. We also didn’t have much water left on board (7.5 inches left of 25) so rather than use up the last of on water it’s time for a marina!
A short marina call & journey
We could actually see the marina from the anchorage. We also looked up the Marina in the Navily app. it’s says they have somewhere to do laundry, hooray! So the main next steps are 1) make sure they have space and 2) head over there…
Only 500m so no map this time
As Captain, Kathryn had the task of calling the marina, but not before preparing some phases incase there was no English speaker.
Do you speak English?
habla usted Inglés?
Can you speak slowly, my Spanish is poor.
Puedes hablar despacio, mi español es pobre.
Do you have space available today?
Tienes espacio disponible hoy?
eleven point five meters
once punto cinco metros
three point two meters
tres punto dos metros
the draft is one point six meters
el calado es de uno punto seis metros
The phone call went well, and we were all set for arrival at 11am, which was 25 minuites later! So anchor up, and on our way.
We switched roles for this little journey with Kathryn running around on deck doing anchors, fenders and lines while Adam took the helm getting us away from the anchorage, through the harbour entrance and into the slip.
You can see our old anchorage in the background of our new slip.
Hannah moored up in the slip
Paper work down, passports scanned, insurance emailed over and €32 paid we were all set.
Wash everything
Task 1, wash all of the things. It turned out that there was no laundry room at the marina, so we had to do this onboard, but with plenty of fresh water.
A sheet being washed in the sink
We also used the fresh water to wash the salt off the hull from yesterday morning, along with a quick deck scrub and also rinsing all of our water gear.
Everything was hung out around the boat. At 34 degrees it was would be dry in no time.
Hannah covered in things drying
Plan Q & Supermarket run
We are preparing for guests. The plan has changed slightly. We will no longer be aiming for Porto for the 2nd August, instead aiming for Vigo. So not Portugal, but Spain instead, and just a little way south of where we currently are.
This is primarily because anchoring in Portugal seems like a bit of a pain, and we think our guests will have more fun if we spend the first week on the west coast of Galicia, Spain. Lots of fun anchorages etc.
This is probably plan Q, we have lost count.
We will be eating 2.5x the ammount of food when we have 5 people aboard, so time to stock up a bit.
We originally considered crossing straight from the English mainland to Brest but decided to head to the Isles of Scilly on day 20, a decision we are still happy with as the Isles of Scilly are beautiful. If anything we wish we could have spent more time there.
After our little morning wake up we set off around 8 am. The plan was for the whole route to take a little over 24 hours, so an 8am start meant we would arrive during the day to Brest.
The whole track was around 140 nautical miles, took 1 day 5 hours with an average speed of 4.7 knots.
It’s always hard to put across what sailing out to sea is like in words, so here are two short clips from different points in time during the crossing.
As we left the Isles of Scilly the sea was extremely flat, as the isles were protecting us from the swell.
As we gained distance from the Isles the swell started to pick up a bit. Here is a video from 14:30 on day 24, 6 hours in.
As we got further into the channel the swell continued to build slightly, and in this clip from 22:44 on day 24, you can see some more rolly larger swells.
Crossing the shipping lanes is always a little bit of fun, especially in the channel where they can be quite busy. You can actually see a large container ship in the background on the video above.
AIS is invaluable here, as all the large ships are required to transmit their location (lots of small boats including Hannah do too). AIS data is displayed within the Navionics app that we use for navigation. Below you can see 2 ships in the channel, their track for the next 20 minutes, as well as where we are.
As we approached France, we put our courtesy flag up (thanks Syliva for hand sewing them all) as the coastline was lit up with lighthouses (very hard to take a picture of). For anyone that doesn’t know, the courtesy flags are a small flag for each country for use when you are in their waters saying that you agree to abide by their laws.
We had to navigate through a rather tidal channel called “Chenal Du Four” which is around 14 nautical miles long and narrows down to roughly 2 nautical miles.
As planned the tide was in our favour, whisking us toward Brest adding around 4 knots to our speed. The top speed on the crossing as a whole was 11 knots over land.
The final part of the passage took us into the entrance to Brest where we tacked all the way up to the rather larger harbour, within which sits Marina du Château.
Initially, our call over VHF to the marina told us there was no room on the visitor pontoons as there was a big event going on that day. We needed to enter the country and the EU so we negotiated a short stop on the fuel pontoon for us to visit the immigration office that is only a 4 minute walk away.
Upon returning the staff had found a place for us within the marina using the spot of another boat that was away for the month, so time to relocate. Our marina track ended up looking a little like this.
Once moored up, we started to relax in the midst of the heatwave, making use of the new handmade wind scoop for the forward hatch (thanks Sylvia).
As mentioned above, we arrived amidst a festival, it also happened to be Bastille day, but we will write about that in the next post! 🙂
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 🙂
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.
