Day 53 – Day 68
Reading Time: Three minutes
Confidence Rating: 8/10 Weather anxiety creeps in!
I am back in London and everyone is asking “Wow, how was it? See any bears?” etc
But the boat hasn’t even left Scotland yet!
Dont worry, everything is still according to the original cunning plan, and the plan was good. The first leg of this “Expedition” was simply to sail from Dunstaffnage (near Oban) up to Ullapool for a crew change. Then I heard mention of Ullapool’s Luggerfest on 23rd May and thought – that could be fun. The May date would be too early to set off to the Faroe Islands so the plan was to leave the boat there for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t a bad wheeze as the sail up the coast plus the three races in Loch Broom gave everything a good shakedown and showed up a few things that could be improved.
On Friday 19th June Torsten and I will get the train to Inverness and somehow work out how to get across to Ullapool. All the Highland busses cost just £2.00 which is amazing value. A bus from Inverness to Oban takes over 3 hours and only costs £2.00! Our dilema is that the Ullapool busses are geared to the ferry crossings and not the train arrivals, so there are no busses to meet the evening train. Minor problem.
As usual the bigger problem is the weather. It is all very warm and gentle in London, enough to lull you into a sense of calm. The North West Coast of Scotland is a different planet. My crew was wearing fur lined mittens when London was in full heat wave mode.
A casual look at the Windy App showed conditions looking good a few days ago but not so good now. You can always wait for a weather break but not when your crew has booked all their flights. The consequences of not being in the Faroes by 27th June would not only be expensive but unacceptable to some crew.
So we need to look positive side of things.
“The wind might be gale force but at least we can get a cut on it”
“We have been through much worse and survived”
“The water will be cold and therefore more dense, so the waves will be lower” That may not be true, but sounds quite reassuring.
So now these little moments of anxiety begin to creep in and confidence levels drop slightly. If it was easy everyone would be doing it.
Shoving worry to the back of my mind, we have a few tasks to complete before setting off and doing things stops you from worrying!
- Fitting a new general service battery is going to be our big task. In theory it should go smoothly assuming the sizes are as stated. Luckily at the last moment I realised that the terminals were going to be different to the battery it is replacing but then I discovered you can buy post convertors. Genius!
- We need to find somewhere to stow our new waterproof drone. Yes we have lashed out on the very latest technology so that we can hopefully find leads in the ice. Whether I will ever learn how to use it is a different matter. I have crashed it once already luckily with no damage. Modern technology leaves me very confused.
- I have made a net cloth to hold back all the gear stowed in the forepeak and prevent it from working loose and falling in the Baby Blake. It will attach with a batten to the back of the low bulkhead and get tensioned via two cheek blocks down to two cam cleats. I am sure it will work – I really think that!
- And most importantly, according to my crew, we need to move the boat off the buoy (kindly lent to us by Johnson and Loftus Boatbuilders) down to the town pontoon so we can get a Friday evening beer!
So that’s all good then! We will tinker around on Saturday and probably leave on Sunday assuming it is not blowing a northerly gale which it probably will be!
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