Happy days are here again

Shorts and Tshirts.

Sun

Decent steady wind on the beam

It’s looking like one of those yachting brochures now!

Here are the actual readings

7kn over the ground

5.4kn through the water

10kn of wind over the deck

We were headed for zeebrugge but as all was going well we carried on to Breskens only hitting foul tide for the last half hour. Though it was quite a tide. Over 3kn across breskens entrance.

Crossing Zeebrugge entrance was interesting too with a yacht sandwich happily avoided. Those big boats are closer and faster than they look and it wasn’t clear they would both pass on front initially. This picture was taken after it had all happened but it’s a bit disconcerting when you’re monitoring one vessel and then it’s twin appears from the opposite direction. Not the time for a series of compass bearings 😱

The breskens / vlissengen channel was super busy with huge ships. And I thought the solent was busy !

So a great days sail covering further in one day than in the previous four put together. And the crew are so much less mutinous when you can easily make a drink, read and sunbathe.

But the best part of all is being able to go to the toilet! This hopefully won’t be too recurrent a theme in this blog, but when it’s cold and rough you have to get below which sometimes isn’t easy, take off your life jacket, your outer jacket, fleece, undo sallopette trousers, remove thermal trousers, then open the two seacocks for the heads, one of which is in an inaccessible cupboard and involves banging your head (otherwise it floods when you’re healed over), then find a way of peeing into the moving target of the pan rather than everywhere but. All, of course whilst feeling you’re inside a washing machine.

Added to this is a rising sense of panic because you’ve been putting it off for as long as possible, and really can’t wait another moment.

A stuck zip at this time can spell disaster!

Then you have repeat the whole thing in reverse. However on sunny, calm, lightly dressed days it couldn’t be more different as you can probably imagine 😎

So Breskens…

Well.. the supermarket closes 5 minutes before you find it and there are a lot of red penguins, as you’d expect, but apart from that it seems a nice enough place.

Oh, and they have crabs

So Holland proper tomorrow… at last!!!