When looking for a weather window, most sailors try to find one with the best sailing conditions. Unfortunately, we haven’t had much to choose from, so we took the one with the least headwind. Given the recent high winds, that translated to an average of 10 m/s or about 20 knots, which is a decent amount of wind pushing against you. That meant motoring 150 NM (nautical miles) in rough choppy seas, because we needed to get to Guernsey and there wasn’t a good weather window in the coming week that we could see. We were able to tack back and forth a bit, but in the end we also had to get to our destination before the winds and seas made it too hard to get into port.
So it took us over 30 hours to travel our 150 NM, which would have been less if we could have sailed the same winds as sidewinds or downwind. Obviously, the biggest thing in sailing is to avoid having deadlines and wait until there is good weather, but there have been repeated high winds from the southwest since we started sailing over a month ago, and if we had waited for perfect sailing weather, we would still be in Denmark or Germany.
We were a bit nervous about sailing the English Channel overnight, but it was very quiet and the biggest concern was fishing boats without their electronic signals (AIS) turned on. Sailing from the coast of France to Guernsey was hard because we had the current with us and the wind against us, so the waves were steep and stopped our forward motion. We crawled at 2 knots of boat speed for the last couple of hours, until we finally got into the shelter of Guernsey and the waves abated.
Well in harbor we found a really helpful and welcoming team, our first experience setting our “Q” flag as we cleared customs, and enjoyed a walk into the local town for fish and chips. Now we are settled in for the week as we wait for some packages we have ordered (why we had to get to Guernsey). More on that later!