St Peter Port to Lymington

The forecasts kept changing but Saturday looked OK. It would be roughest just north of Guernsey and then gradually calming down as we crossed to the UK mainland. Rough was a relative thing - predicted wave height of up to 3m, mainly a 2m swell that would be on our beam anyway. So. Saturday it was, a nice forecast for a run back.

The challenge was the optimum departure time to a) have enough water over the marina cill to get out and b) to use the tides to our advantage as far as possible and c) to avoid going through the known pot infested areas in the dark.

You guessed it - another 3:30 alarm to allow us to depart as soon as it was twilight from St Peter Port. The Morlaix race yachts were up and about preparing for the last leg of their race and so we had a big audience as we wriggled out of our little spot backwards and reversed to the marina entrance. Here is the entrance looking back as we left:

Not very light really was it.  We were well on our way to the Casquets area by the time the sun came up properly hence we saw it from the pilothouse side windows this time, normally it does so in the forward windows during this trip. We were early departing:

The tide roared us down the coast of Guernsey and gave us a good healthy shove pretty much until we reached the shipping lanes. We were lucky in the eastbound lane, our course avoided all of them quite nicely:

Naturally some speed freaks just whizz past burning obscene amounts of fossil fuel:

Between the shipping lanes we had three pot markers to dodge, then the westbound lane was another miracle of timing. Of course it could not last, once we were clear of the formal lanes we had a couple of diversions. The route looked like:























The usual S shape is due to allowing the tide to take us east and west as it wished and we ended up pretty much in the right place near the Needles fairway buoy:

As we got closer to civilisation and had a phone signal so the crew became busy:

This time the needles were more visible:

After a little bit of wing engine exercise and a wide open throttle blast for the main engine we were happy to moor in Lymington and fall onto some food and a teeny drop of white wine too.

Nice trip - a few 3m swells to start with but then calmer and calmer. We ran at 1800rpm to help optimise the tides and avoid the wind that was forecast to pick up on our nose later on. It didn't by the way.

No maintenance news to report from the run. Happy Lugger engines. However we did get a little reminder of our time in Guernsey,  we made it to the Sunday papers! A picture of us in the outer harbour was used by the Observer / Guardian, see this link newspaper article. We are not so sure about being linked to the subject matter at our advancing age though, all a little too close to home. The Picture was impressive, spot the Nordhavn 47:

but no royalties were paid of course...