Day 2 : Azores to Ireland

Thursday, May 19th 2022

So it turns out that I’m a true Scotsman, and it’s not just because of what I wear under my kilt.

This morning, when I came on watch, for the very first time I really could sense how close we are getting to Britain, and despite how much I love and miss Australia, and consider myself Australian (actually I call myself a Scozzie), I had an unmistakeable sense of “I’m coming home”.

Exactly as forecasted, the bigger winds returned on the afternoon of day 2. This mini depression left most of its mark back at the Azores, and had mostly blown itself out by the time it reached us, so we’ve only been experiencing mid 20’s overnight, with mercifully flat seas. In fact, given that the wind is just aft of the beam, these are actually great sailing conditions, and we’ll be sorry when the weather system passes over later this afternoon, as we’ll have 3 days of very light winds to come.

Our PredictWind software gives us access to huge swathes of information, and so we knew this was coming. But we actually only download the bare minimum of data while we’re at sea due to internet speed limitations.

One piece of information we’ve never really bothered to include in our downloads is the rain forecast. To be honest, it’s been pretty irrelevant for most of the last 4 years. In the tropics, it’s either wet or dry season. And we tried to time our location so we’re never really sailing in the wet season.

So the rain we’ve tended to experience is either a very brief tropical downpour, or the violent (but also short-lived) rain that accompanies squalls near the equator.

Both of those rain events can be quite spectacular, but are hard to forecast accurately, and are over so quickly that they don’t really have much of an impact on anything.

By contrast, British rain (or more accurately, the rain across much of Northern Europe) is totally different. It’s not quite so spectacular, but way more pervasive. When it rains, it just rains, and rains and rains, and you have an inescapable feeling that it may never stop.

That’s the rain that greeted me this morning when I came into the cockpit for my dawn watch, and I felt a perverse little twinge of cosy familiarity.

Cosy because of our awesome hardtop and enclosure which we had built in Thailand, which means we can sail the boat entirely, including putting reefs in the sails or putting them away completely, from our wonderful dry cockpit.

And perverse because surely only a British person would take comfort in the familiarity of cold, bleak, unrelenting rain.

Break out the Irn Bru, the haggis, and the chip butties – we’re almost there!

Day 2 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 1 day, 20 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 145 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 6.0 knots

Distance to go: 880 nm

Number of clouds in the sky this morning as dawn broke – 0. You don’t get clouds with this kind of rain. The entire sky is just one dark grey solid blanket. I swear I was about 10 before I even knew what clouds were.