Biscay pictures

The whole trip so far has been affected by a certain rush to reach Biscay before autumn with more likelihood for stronger winds. Ironically, when finally crossing the notorious Bay, we suffered from lack of wind rather than too much of it. We ended up spending six days on something that could be done in three. We had north winds, which are yes, the right ones thinking of our direction of sailing.The sail shop in the UK managed to send our new working jib to a wrong address, and it never arrived to us in Ireland before departure. Our wardrobe, when it comes to head sails, was little limited. This caused us to sail with the wind very inefficiently: We were basically tacking our way down in less than 5 m/s wind almost all the way. We would have walked faster!

The crossing was a good experience in many ways, thanks to Christophe and Alice from France who supported us in sailing, navigation, on helm, did almost all kitchen work. The permanent crew of Kiwi suffer in times quite seriously from sailing tiredness and distorted perspective on their adventure. Arrival to Spain marks for us a change, end of hurrying, more time to discover the coast and less time in the cockpit.

In addition to the light winds during the crossing from Ireland, we had the best possible weather, with beautiful sunsets (and I guess sun rises, but not  during my watch ; )), beutiful thunderstorms in the far horizont, moderate waves. We were regularly visited by dolphins, which sometime rode in the bow wave of Kiwi. There were even dolphin youngsters and we saw wales too. 

As an additional adventurous aspect, Kiwi’s start engine broke two days before arrival to Spain. By fiddling with cables and by using Ismo’s screw driver trick, we got the engine started and drove safely to port. A new solenoid is installed, and the engine starts better than ever.  

So where is the wind?

Alice in action

An escape

Christophe and a double rainbow

Baby dolphin

It’s amazing to have Kiwi, the same boat which I’ve shovelled so much snow from last winter in Tromsø, now bathing under the Spanish hot sun. Kiwi deserves a little break here in La Coroña and so does the crew. Christophe and Alice travelled back to Paris, Philipp headed to Portugal to meet some friends yesterday, Sanja works on removing the tons of salt from the boat's interior, clothing and everything and makes minor maintenance.