A tedious slog

French or European weather models?

We enjoyed a very pleasant and quiet night on the mooring bouy at St Evette, however, the forecast for the day was again a bit iffy. One option was to stay another night with a very good chance that the wind would turn into the bay and make life a bit uncomfortable. The other option was to keep going, and to hope that the wind wouldn’t increase as much as forecasted. The French AROME model forecast 20-25 kn while the other European models forecast lighter winds. Unfortunately, all the models predicted that we’d have head winds. What would the French know about their own weather, we thought, and we took a bet on the European models.

It is the French model, stupid

Well, the French obviously know their weather better than anyone else, and, while yesterday’s push against the current was interesting and amusing, today ended up just being a tedious slog. Instead of pushing into a strong current with a fresh wind as we did yesterday, today we pushed with the current into strong winds. This isn’t the best of combinations and it resulted in a choppy, messy day where we were bouncing so much that no point of sail in even vaguely the right direction would give us any speed or a comfortable ride. For most of the trip to and around Pointe de Penmarc’h we just sheeted her in hard and pointed as high as the waves would let us. A pod of dolphins joined us at one point, hoping for a bow ride, but our sailing was so messy that they left us again, no doubt quite disappointed.

Glad to find a harbour

Of course, as we rounded the point, where we might have hoped to be able to tack east and drop off the wind a touch, the wind backed with us and so we were forced to keep her pointed high and heeled well over, despite the reefs. Bah. Oh well, from there it was only another hour or so to the nearest harbour and the further we got into the bay the more the waves dropped away.

After a tiring 8 hrs day of sailing during which we only sailed just 36 nm, we were finally able to poke into the very tiny Lesconil harbour where we slipped into one of the few visitor’s berths, happy that the day was over.