Onboard and ready to go. Here are some tactical thoughts pour la matin...I've just finished looking at the weather,tides and routing for tomorrow. It's interesting.
The wind is due to start sw'ly (230deg) and veer all day into the west(270) so that means on the wind most of the day. About 15kts+ all day. Bouncy! The tide will be running west to east until 3pm so we should be finishing on the next east-west phase - sometime between 5-8pm tomorrow evening. So what would you do!?
It will be upwind to the needles and then the BIG decision is when to tack onto starbord and head off accross the channel. My routing software says tack straight away, let yourself get pushed well east of the course and let the tide and shift take you back west in the afternoon. There is logic in this but it's risky and I also don't trust the computer for a lot of reasons! Thew reason it's risky is if the breeze doesn't shift we won't get back up to the course and more importantly if it dies and we don't get to Alderney before 7.30pm then the tide will have changed and you DO NOT want to be downtide anywhere near Alderney.
So the safe thing may be to put a bit of westing in on starboard after the needles while the tide is slack and then tack over. We shall see..
Of sourse, all this is theory and we'll have to see what it looks like in the morning. And of course what everyone else does..
I hope that all made sense to some of you! If anyone fancies running some routing overnight please tell me what to do in the morning!
On the housekeeping side - first dinner was prawn biryani. No beer, backstay and boat in general ready to go. The band up in the yacht haven sound like they've just finished the cheesiest set in the world so I can Sleep now...
It's all good clean single handed fun ;)
Paddy
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