We CROSSED the BAY OF BISCAY six months after buying a BOAT No. 148

They say that if you fall off a horse, the first thing you do is get back on. When we were anchored in the Halford River last month, it seemed like ending up in France was a distant wish, something so far away from us and our reality. But then, so was buying this boat six months ago, so was taking it out for the first time, so was sailing down to Saint Austell or coming into a new marina for the first time. But then slowly, we did each one of those things, and the next jump seemed a little less ridiculous. We have got back on the horse and now we cross the Bay of Biscay. It's baking here. It's roasting. It's like really, there's like no air, there's like no wind. There's no air. We're a bit delusional. So we got in here at about half four. We were given the tiniest berth ever. Should be for like a 20-foot boat. We're a 40-foot boat. We squished it in Zach Helms and he did a fantastic job. Then we went and found customs and it was this really weird building. It looked like a prison. Anyway, it was really quick and easy. The guys literally looked at our passports, took them away, stamped them, gave them back to us. And it's the most surreal feeling that we've just sailed our own boat we bought six months ago to a foreign country. And it was an even weirder feeling because we had our quarantine flag up, but we thought no one knows we've actually arrived. We're gonna go have some food now and have a shower and chill for the rest of the afternoon evening because we're pooped. Good morning. It's the first morning in France and we slept so well. Oh my gosh, we went to sleep at nine o'clock and just zonked out throughout the night. I think it's very needed. But this morning we have a long list of things to do, starting with popping to the office, the marina office, and finding out which kind of hose adapter you have to get to have water at the pontoon. So they've got these electric units and they have these little metal things at the bottom and apparently that's water and you have to buy an adapter and a hose for it. So I mean we'll just have to go do that because we need water. And then we need to pick up a few bits of food. We need to sort out our internet because the marina has wi-fi but it's shocking so we can't really look at our weather because ideally we wanted to leave today but it's foggy at the moment and we need to know where the wind's coming from and all that to pick an anchorage. We've got a bit of wear in one of our jib sheets so we want to look for a new one of those and then we need to clean our solar panels. Just little jobs and the boat to be fair. The boat is grubby from the salt. We've decided to come to the office and get the weather for the next few days. Our initial plan was to hop to an anchorage in Brest then pooter down the french coast a little. However once we checked the weather some big systems were coming in and unless we left to cross the bay today it would be weeks before we got another chance. Suddenly the relaxing day wandering around Brest turned into a crazy mission of getting our errands done in time to leave in just a few hours. Time to rinse and bite and tick off some things off the list. There's lines down here. 20% off. Great. Successful trip. My new hose. We'll see you there. Engage on. You're heading out in two hours. We'll see you at the crossing. Best of luck. I'm really excited. I'm so excited actually. Good Spain. Breakfast of french plums and a croissant later we were approaching the Rasta sign. Similar to the Chanel de Fours the previous day this rock infested current gushing stretch of water was one that required careful planning. We had to fight the flood at Brest in order to hit this when the tide was on its way out and luckily we got the timing spot on and cruised down this stretch of water with ease avoiding the multiple cardinal markers indicating dangers lurking beneath the water. Have we successfully navigated that section? Yes just about. One more bit to go but we've avoided that rock. I'm dirty. Look at this moon. Oh my gosh so beautiful. We're out in the bay. I'm just really proud of us. Not only did we give the crossing a go again we went into like new marinas we went into a finger berth in a different marina for the first time in a small one at that. It's going to be a nice night I think. Yeah it's really peaceful out here. I'm hoping all of those knots we've got at the moment isn't just the tide still. Yeah tell them how fast we went through Rasta sign. It'll be like 10 knots at most. Just easily five knots of tide with us. Which is exactly what the pilot book said. Which is ridiculous. Go to bed Becca please. Okay fine. Good night. Good night. I think it's about six in the morning and we just hit seven knots and we have our genoa whisked out on one side and our main on the other side and we've got our mizzen up. We were heading pretty much dead downwind and we were super rolly. Waves were behind us but then I thought you know what we're going off our bearing quite a lot so let's just bear up into the wind and we turned about 20 degrees and we just started hooning along and we did actually, I know it's really rocky now, but we did actually flatten out a lot which is really nice. The sea state's picked up a bit and the wind's picked up now that's why we're going a bit faster but yeah I'm feeling happy. We made progress. I experimented. I had the full moon above me and a constellation of stars and I was just like you know what I've got this and I just experimented and it's really paid off. Feeling very happy right now but yeah. Oh that's the autopilot now. That hasn't stopped. Anyway time for me to get a few more hours of sleep. It's currently 8 30 and I just woke up for my my second little nap and we are still hooning it along. We're really really going for it. The waves have picked up I think they're about 1.6 slash 1.7 meters high at around six seconds so short periods but they're just pushing us along and me and Zac are pushing the boat now. Last time we weren't and this time she's so much happier going through waves with her sails trimmed well and some speed behind her. So that's what we're doing and we're actually quite ahead of schedule. We are very much in the bay. We're like a quarter of the way across. This is so manageable and it's a bit more intensive on the fact that you can't just we can't both just come down below and leave the cockpit. Well we can because we've got a dual helm but the autopilot is coping but when we're surfing waves you kind of go off course and then it tries to tweak itself and we've actually been well Zac spent about half an hour last night customizing the autopilot so it doesn't make such dramatic adjustments and it's really helped because we're quite downwind we want to be able to monitor the bearing so we don't want to jibe at all. Although we've got preventers on all of our booms at the moment so that's at least nice. I'm about to take over from Zac on watch and he's gonna make some breakfast and yeah let's get to Spain guys. We're surfing these big rollers you can just look down and see dolphins hopping and it's amazing. I'm dying for a cup of tea. It's gonna be a fun cup of tea. No if I put on the gimbal it's probably gonna be a bit easier but I can stay there. So we're at 100% battery at the moment as well so that's why I'm using that instead of the gas. Such a beautiful day out. Me and Zac just sat for a while and just stared out and we're so overwhelmed almost to be in the middle of the Biscayne but so happy. It's just beautiful out here. We haven't picked up the camera in a little while because our course is slightly that way just slightly to the side of us and because of the waves they've been pushing us like this way so occasionally when there's a bit of a lull we kind of dart that way and we were darting that way to try and get over because the winds are picking up tonight and the waves picking up and the period's dropping so we wanted to make headway back to our course for tonight. So I was kind of gunning across, Zac was making himself a flask of tea. Anyway a freak wave came out and the whole boat just let the bow ploughed into the water. Anyway the whole flask of tea went all over the camera like the whole flask just straight on top so we left it in the sun to dry out but it seems to be working fine. Can you guys see me all right? It seems to be fine. Time is now 5.42am and we have about 161 nautical miles to go which is crazy because we left yesterday at 3pm. The sea state has definitely picked up now we're in the deeper bit of the bay about there. It's definitely got wavier. The waves tonight are meant to pick up to 1.7m at 6.3 seconds behind us which isn't an issue however we've just got to make sure we can surf them because our autopilot sometimes has a hissy fit when it surfs waves. They're meant to pick up around midnight so whether that will be us hand steering for most of the night I don't know we'll just have to see. It's been doing okay since we've adjusted the rudder sensitivity but yeah it's just something we've got to keep an eye on. It's also going to be gusting up to 25 knots tonight so we just checked we can reef our genoa with our whisker pole and we can which is really nice and we're gonna take a reef in our main about eight o'clock tonight because the gusts are meant to start picking up to about 18 knots at nine so yeah nice and early after we have dinner but yeah apart from that it's going swimmingly. I just had a shower well a little like sink shower because it's a taily shower which is a sink with a shower head for you but I felt a lot better and it's really nice to keep a sense of normalcy. Wow there we go it's nice to keep a sense of normalcy on trips like this because it's all too easy to not keep clean and to wear the same clothes it's like hiking or camping it's just too easy not to so yeah we're trying our hardest to keep in as much of a routine as we can that means like having dinner at the same time and three meals a day even though we're napping throughout the day too but yeah going good and oh also this is kind of crazy so I made some predictions so what did I just say how much longer did I say to go uh 161 nautical miles and we did all our route planning as doing five knots max we haven't been doing that we've been doing like seven actually max we've been doing like nine we've been going really fast down the waves so our average speed is now at least six knots so it should take I think around I might be wrong I might be doing my maths completely wrong here um but it will probably maybe take around 26 hours to get to Gijon and it's 5.45 now which means we're going to get in about 7.45 tomorrow night which just doesn't seem right because we only left yesterday and it's meant to take four days but then we do have our own little mini trade winds and the waves so who knows but we're flying along it's now about 10 p.m and I'm trying to get some sleep but it's dusting 23 knots out there we've we've dodged no we've reefed our main we did all that way earlier we did that after dinner when it was big calm we're going like eight nine knots consistently which is just fast for a big heavy boat but it's fine we're in control and we know we can slow down if we need to on the radar this has really kind of booked me out I'm already a little on edge because it's night time it's a really cloudy night so it's just pitch black out there there's big waves you can see and our prop as you can hear because we're surfing down the waves it's going so fast so it makes everything seem really hectic and then obviously we're getting pushed by waves and rolling a lot so it's a it's a lot right now and I'm trying to sleep and I'm kind of fired up on adrenaline but yeah there was four things that appeared on our radar and they were moving so fast and the icon wouldn't really show what they were I checked again and they'd all disappeared off the radar and I was what's happening but I could see their lights in the real distance I looked at the speed of one and it was doing 20 knots it wasn't steaming so it wasn't like a ship so what the heck is that and then I look at its track across this the radar screen sorry we're really moving look at this track across the radar screen and it's just going straight and it's aiming just straight for us oh my god so no he flew quite close to us but ahead of us I think he was a fast cat he was flying along anyway he's long gone now but there's three others on our port side so just keeping an eye on them and it just adds another little spiciness to this already spicy night so it's the next morning it's friday morning and it's about eight o'clock me and Zac are pretty pooped we had a long night we had to hand steer some of it essentially what happened is the wind shifted as the whisker pole was out there was kind of not much we could do so we ended up heading on a different course which just really wasn't great and we were really unbalanced and the autopilot wasn't picking up so we had to hand steer and yeah there was gusts a lot of gusts the water's looking so much nicer there though so we're about 65 nautical miles now off the coast of Bain the sea state has really changed now I think it's because we've just got out of the deeper bit of the Bay of Biscay or just about to get deeper out of the deeper bit onto the shallowest shelf wind's going kind of nicely it's slowly changing direction to be more on our beam instead of directly behind us so at some point in the next hour or two we might end up heading down the whisker pole and just having the genoa as it normally is there's the main swell coming in I think it won't really show on camera but there's a main swell coming in there then there's like secondary there's this like secondary but all over the place doesn't really know what it's doing and then randomly another wave will meet and push out and I don't know it's a bit of a confused sea state but keep thinking I can see like outlines of land I think it's a mirage I was having that but on a boat in the night I was like oh I'm losing the plot we're about 40 nautical miles away from Spain at the moment Becca's just having a nap we just had to turn the engine on because there is pretty much no wind now but it's not too bad we've sailed all the way here which is pretty happy about so yeah last little hurdle now I think we're gonna get in about midnight from here but it's a beautiful day outside now it's really warmed up you've noticed that we've finally got somewhere warm coming to put our spanish courtesy flag up and yes we know they're small we're not going to talk about it awesome flags if any of you have been watching for a while you know our enzyme shenanigans but anyway we're moving on hi look this is our starboard I don't know what it's called really flag idea it's probably a proper name for it starboard line to hoist our courtesy flag however the other day I was taking the french one down and to be fair it did get tangled so I couldn't put it down so I gave it a yank anyway the whole thing came down so I've got to go up the mast when we get to the marina and fix that but for now it's going to go on the port side fly the fly the spanish flag how exciting I don't really know what it symbolizes if you put it on the other the other side maybe it's like a I'm sure it's fine I know that you can put club flags on the other side but imagine if it's like a it's a Spain that's not like I love you Spain this is hate you Spain maybe we're making a really bad mistake here yeah we just spotted land the first time in well it hasn't even been that long two days just over there we did something right so we just heard Spanish radio for the first time which is exciting since leaving France and the one thing we noticed in France was they only spoke obviously they only spoke in French on the VHF I was under the impression that channel 16 was a an English spoken channel might be wrong but yeah all the securities everything was in French so we couldn't really understand much of it so that was a little bit of a struggle however there's a positive note in this because in Spain they say it in English and Spanish so that's really nice they've just put on the navigation warnings in English so that's great this day's been good to us got some turquoise water and what a sense of accomplishment crossing a body of water and not an easy one I bet six months after buying buying a boat we did it it's tough at times but this makes it all worth it it's currently about 11 p.m and we are honing in on the Gijon coast we've got about 12 nautical miles to go lights are all becoming clearer yeah we're really looking forward to getting in be the first time going into a foreign marina or any marina in the dark but we've studied all the navigational lights and I'm sure it'll be well lit but the winds have definitely picked up we got told that along the coast all the way to Acaruna the winds really gust through there so decided to take a reef really early and we're really happy with our decision because I think it's gusting hard to tell but maybe about 20 22 maybe up to 23 24 knots and later in the night it's meant to pick up to 25 knots so it's going to get really quite windy but our full genoa at the moment because we reefed our genoa the other day because we know you're meant to reef them equally so the boat's balanced but actually our genoa is the thing that kind of pulls us through the waves and it's flat so yeah we haven't really done genoa but it's super easy to reef with pressure on it so you can just furl it if we need to we just got in and the last few hours were a lot we had the wind really gust like we're taking reefs but it was really gusting like pushing us over and the waves were just relentless aside on until literally we got around the marina breakwater and we tried contacting the marina and they didn't answer on the bhf or the phone so we had to just like find our way in a foreign marina around a breakwater there's like so many navigational things here there's like cardinal markers everywhere which for those who don't know are markers that mark danger and you have to work out the north south east and west of them depending on the flashes of color and there were so many of those but in the bay it started really raining we had to turn head to wind put our sails down and like we were going up waves it was so scary and we were just like trying to get ourselves down and then the rain was torrential raining had to really motor because it wouldn't turn head to wind so the waves just pushing us sideways in addition so much rain was creating like this fog effect and i was like please don't hit us with that as well but we did it we're okay we crossed the bay of biscay right now i need to sleep and have a really good shower but i can wait everything can wait just need to have a rest well we did it we bloody did it