OliJ.co.uk

It was an exhausting week, having set sail for the Helford river on Sunday the 15th at 5pm and then finally docking at 2am on Saturday morning, but I am now a qualified day Skipper! We sailed at night, in fog, in fairly heavy seas, with the wind gusting to force 8 and in pouring rain (with all of these at the same time at one point!) - so I think I gained a fair bit of experience!!

This weekend I'm going to be taking part in the Round the Island Race on the Isle of Wight in the Sunsail 37 class (Boat #30) which should be pretty exciting..

Well, after my last post, it was pretty horrible to hear about the 21 dolphins that died just a short distance from the ones that were playing alongside the boat on Friday. They were the same species that I wrote about in this post: http://www.olij.co.uk/labels/Sailing.html

BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7443626.stm

Labels: dolphins

Got back in to Falmouth on Friday after a trip to Fowey; We set sail at 11.30 on Thursday and got in to Fowey for 3.30 in the afternoon. I've got to say that Fowey is a really nice, typical Cornish port, and it has some great restaurants too!

After spending the night on Wazobia, we left at the same time as the day before, and got to the entrance to Carrick Roads for just after 2, having made about 8 knots over the ground (thanks to my new found navigational skills and tide stream knowledge!)

We had to wait for the tide to rise for an hour or so before heading to the marina, which had us pottering about off Maenporth, between the large ship mourings, where we spotted some dolphins! I think they were bottlenose dolphins, but I may be wrong:



Pics are here: http://ojobson.fotki.com/trips/sailing/falmouth--fowey--fa/

Labels: falmouth, fowey, sailing

Well this week I've passed my day skipper theory exams, which mostly involves using some big charts, a compass and divider and plotting bearings, headings, waypoints, Fixes, water tracks, ground tracks, finding out estimated positions, tidal streams, tidal depths, chart datum, drying heights and... well, you get the picture - its quite a lot to take in but I passed both exams with only one, slightly wrong question (it was a badly written question!!) so go me!

So naturally I've just drawn up a course to Ibiza, and, well without even looking at the tidal streams I've figured out it would take 15 days of non-stop sailing just to travel the 1770nm that it would take to get there! It could be less, as that was a course that hugged the coastline, rather than sailing across the vast empty space that is the Bay of Biscay (doing that would make it just 1460 nm) so maybe somewhere like a 400 mile trip to La Rochelle would be a bit more appropriate/possible..?

Labels: falmouth, sailing