Round Britain Diary

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Day 3 and its foggy

We say good bye to Into the Red who are staying on at the Scilly's before heading back to France.

A local fishing boat coming back in and tells us the fog is only for a mile or so, so we sort out a communication plan and we leave the scilly's...

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Around the corner we see another boat that we were moored next to in Plymouth and they say the same, it's only for about a mile...

We follow our tracks around the islands from the day before as we know they are sound

Follow the leader and keep the boat in front to you in sight!!!

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The fog lets up and we're good to go

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We make some good progress but then our foggy friend returned, but we needed to break right and head across the shipping lanes and up into the Bristol Channel. We were on our way to north Cornwall and then onto Lundy Island.

By using AIS, Radar (on the Targa's) and VHF and communicating with the coastguard we found a gap between the 4 tankers in our vicinity and safely made it across.

A massive thank you to Mike D and Hugh and everyone who helped.

Once across the shipping lanes the fog thickened again and convinced it was a land fog we started to head north away from Cornwall.

All of a sudden the group was split...

Mike D knew exactly what to do and gave us a bearing and we crawled along until we all met up again.

Awesome leadership and teamwork.

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Within seconds the fog lifted (it's a funny thing fog) and we were surrounded by dolphins

[Barrowboy]

Great stuff Alex and Jurgen....look forward to following instalments!

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After a floating break we change direction push up to Lundy Island.

I'm leading the way and pushing hard, but we have to stay within our rev range, if we gun it everywhere we'll waste fuel...

We arrive at Lundy and the team soon finds out that we have to pay to step foot on the Island Sod that, lets circumnavigate Lundy and find some seals

We say hi to Mike who looks so relaxed, Mike holds the world record for the fastest time Round Britain, 37 hours in a Scorpion Sting called Hot Lemon.

Now for Mike, this isn't a challenge, it walk in the park

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Seals at Lundy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBzl...ature=youtu.be

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By this time we had met up with another RIB called Scrambled as they were going round Britain too on their own So we arranged to meet up later.

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Again the sea was calm as we blasted towards Nayland Marina, South West Wales...

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Off to pat my boat now so I'll see you lot later

[HUMBER P4VWL]

Makes a good read fella. The fog must have been pretty intimidating. AIS pretty useful!!

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Originally Posted by HUMBER P4VWL

Makes a good read fella. The fog must have been pretty intimidating. AIS pretty useful!!

Crossing the shipping lanes we used the equipment we had to pinpoint the ships and then we cross referenced that using the coastguard by getting them to pinpoint us as well as the container ships. By having a fixed VHF and a handheld I could monitor all the conversations as well as advise Jurgen on navigation using the plotter. We waited for our gap and then crossed.

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We have quite a long encounter with some dolphins and then back on our way again...

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We finally arrive in Nayland and we are greeted by Downhilldi from the forum

There's a party on in the marina and a BBQ too, so we hang around until the band stops playing and then head off to sleep on the pontoons

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End of day 3 (These are the planned routes that we intended to take)

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Day 4

Another lovely morning!!!

We walk up the pontoon, have a shower and then it's time for breakfast, most of the teams are 30 minutes away in B&Bs.

Todays and exciting day as we are off to Southern Ireland

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Back at the boat Jurgen has already been in the water to check the seams and he wants me to also check.

So in I go, checking as much as I can. There is nothing that I can see or feel but still we are confident that everything is ok to continue.

There is no water in the hull and running with the trunk down is working very well.

So we're good to go

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By this time we had decided not to use our secondary tanks so we emptied these into our main under deck tank, so we were lighter than ever before.

We were checking our fuel data all the time and always fine tuning everything, from memory we were the first team at the boat and the last ones to leave in the evening. This routine was driven by Jurgen and we soon had a routine on the best way to refuel, refill oil and the many other things we did everyday to give us the best possible chance of reliability.

The crossing to Southern Ireland wasn't great, it wasn't the worst I've seen by far but enough to smash us about a bit.

A crew member on Finn (Redbay 7.4) got seasickness, both Targa's had alarms going off and our Scott seats were working hard.

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Sadly to two Targa's needed repair, their modern engines required more than just a tweak. They would need parts and software to repair so sadly we left them in Rosslare with Duma and Blueray to support them safely to a mooring.

In high spirits we received this picture later from the Targa's on Tour