This is about yesterday 3 Oct. Left Gosport at 0615 in what passes for dark in a busy port. The only difficulty is spotting other boats, especially the yacht who had no navigation lights on - we advised him of this quite firmly.
Passed through the Looe Channel with hardly a ripple at local slack water and the sky lightening. Sails all up and engine off, we had a lovely sail until the wind dropped as forecast. We were mentally prepared for a motoring delivery trip.
Halfway across the 34nm straight line to Newhaven Lesley had a bright idea; conditions are benign, the autopilot is steering and we are feeling good so why not just keep going to Dover and save a day? A quick calculation of tide times and flows suggested we could just catch the slack point as it moves east up the channel and only have 4 hours of foul tide at the end maybe getting to Dover by 1am. Good call. Sorry Newhaven maybe another year.
In the end we were just behind the slack, had more foul tide and got in with no drama at 0230. We did 2hr watches and slept during off watch to stay fresh. The wind never came back so the on watch consisted of keeping an eye on the engine and autopilot and looking for fishing boats and pot buoys (in the dark that's hard and impossible respectively).
It was our longest leg ever so far with just the two of us, 106nm in 20 hrs, 8 of which were in the dark.
The pic is this morning in Dover Marina with lovely weather for one more day.
Sent from Samsung Mobile on O2
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