A little messanger joins us. Tails of getting through the trafic sepparation scheme.
Dawn, we arrive at the NW Spanish coast 50 miles out and a Traffic Separation Scheme staring us in the face. Do we go left, do we go right, inside or outside the shipping lane? This was a moment I had postponed. A matter of seeing how well we fared before making the decision to press on straight for Lisbon or take in some of the Spanish coast north of Portugal. The days runs of 142, 86, 99, and 116 knots had been unencumbered with the threat of obstacles, wind or rough seas. It had been a perfect passage. The only sticky bit, loosing the VHF on the first night, but this proved not a problem, being able to quickly repair it the following morning. The morning of the 9th was a different proposition all together
Ed and I started out on 6 hour shifts bridging the night but we quickly go tired out and shifted to a 3 hour rotation. On the night of the 8th the wind was coming up and we put in a second reef before I went down bellow for three hours rest. I knew we were close to the shipping lane and I estimated arrival several miles off about the time I needed to wake up. Over the night the wind had shifted through N to NE and finally E, blowing about F5-F6. We were both a bit sleep deprived and we had an interesting couple of hours, beating to windward and trying to work out the best strategy to get across a 20 mile wide shipping lane. In the end we opted for sailing across the first lane which did not appear to have heavy traffic and then motor the last 10 miles perpendicular to the stream of traffic, into the teeth of the wind. Our original choice of landfall was quickly dropping out of range. We were headed for Camarinas.
The last day out, 67 knots, the wind dropped off once we were in inshore waters. A little bird dropped in to visit us and dinner was a well earned portion of Irish stew, spuds, carrots and cabbage. Desert was outrageous, consisting of fried bananas in sugar with rum and creme fraishe and melted dark chocolate. We arrived in Camarinas just after nightfall, about 10 pm, the major leg of the journey completed.