Progress

After a great start on Sunday and Monday, widdershins progress has halted. The wind is gusty enough to keep us in port. Progress in other areas is good though.

We did promise ourselves to treat this journey as a holiday and to stay places when we wanted to and to not stretch ourselves too much. The inshore waters forecast is mostly F5-F6 with some F7s. xcweather shows mostly F4 with F6 and F7 gusts. For example at Weybourne at the moment (13:00 Friday) the wind is 27 to 35 knots.We would go in a steady F5, or even with low-end F6 gusts but so far, every day has had long periods of really strong gusts. Tonight is a possibility but Sunday looks horrid. We think Monday will be fine, but the weather on Monday won't be what the forecast says now, so we will see.

So we are having a very pleasant and productive time in Lowestoft. The Royal Norfolk and Suffolk is a lovely place to stay and we keep finding things to do ashore and things to do aboard.

Sorting out the Wykeham-Martin gear has been the most important thing but I have also bought new rope for the peak hardener (the old one was too short), fitted a light in the fore-peak and made it possible to run all the DC electrics from shore power. This latter was something I installed when we first bought Robinetta but never put into service. Now we have a little 12V fridge (7L beer cooler from Maplin) it makes sense to use it. All I had to do was put a bigger fuse in - what it really needs is a slow blow fuse to cope with the transformer in-rush. I also have a separate transformer to charge the batteries from shore power but I haven't yet made that work.

Alison is making a canvas mast boot to replace the poly-tarp we have been using since Tollesbury.