We left Jersey in the early evening of 7th May. The crew consisted of Graham Oldroyd, Clive Meek, Tony Robinson and John Hatton-Edge. Graham sails regularly round the Straits of Gibraltar and plans to take his Yachtmaster qualification. Clive has had a fair amount of experience and John has owned a Discovery 55 for a number of years. Tony has crewed with me for many years. The trip of around 1200 miles took almost exactly a week. We had no stops en route and had a range of weather conditions. The Bay of Biscay was fairly benign. Off the coast of Portugal we had strong NE winds and made good progress with a reefed main and our solent jib. Off the Algarve we lost the wind and had to motor. We had a couple of technical problems; the windex ceased to work and the main Furler did not work well which meant we had to furl manually. After the first 24 hours most evidence of sea sickness had gone and we settled pretty well into our watch routine. We arrived safely in the late afternoon of the 14th May.
CCM