Friday 26 August
Another day begins before sunrise, with the anchor weighed by 0615 local time, and we set off in no wind and thick haze. I felt a couple of light rain showers on my topsides before the sun came out and Skipper organised an undersized spinnaker to fly off my bow. Unfortunately progress was still too slow at the beginning of this 140 nautical mile passage, but I did enjoy a brief moment of excitement when a Gendarme Militaire vessel came out of Boulogne directly to catch us up and check we didn’t look like anything untoward was occurring. They gave my crew a cheery wave, so it seems we didn’t look suspicious – shame, I do like a man in uniform. I could hear the big ships trundling along the shipping lanes ahead of us (in the Traffic Separation Scheme: TSS), but they weren’t yet visible through the persistent heat haze.
My crew followed an approximate three-hour watch rotation, but they really need to practise this, and learn to relax quicker when they are off watch. Mate’s evening watch saw us racing along at eight knots on a close reach, heeled a little on a starboard tack: I do love this kind of sailing; it’s so what I was built for. The sunset entertained her for ages, and sailing west into the lighter sky makes the night feel shorter. Lights along the French coast were far more visible than the land had been in daylight. Before the moon rose a canopy of stars arched overhead, including the Milky Way, rarely seen from land, and a couple of shooting stars were spotted. There was also a sighting of the Skylab in orbit, identified by a steadily moving single white light.
As the new electronics give an estimated arrival time at a given waypoint destination, Mate decided I was travelling too fast and tried to slow me down by easing the sails to reduce the heel and improve Skipper’s rest. This didn’t have much effect, so she furled the genoa completely, reducing my speed to a mere 5.5 knots. However, this was to prove a short-sighted decision, as we should have banked good progress against wind speed reduction and direction changes, and the adverse tide, yet to come.
Skipper came up on deck to relieve the Mate at around 2300, and the wind backed a little, giving me a broader reach, a more comfortable and faster point of sail. He was a little concerned about a couple of ships of unknown identity that seemed to come a bit close to us: it’s always disconcerting to find something large, lit up like Blackpool illuminations, not following the shipping lanes. When Mate took over again at the helm, one of these mystery ships turned out to be the Brittany Ferries overnight boat from Portsmouth into Ouistreham-Caen.