Early thoughts for 2018

I've had a little look at the practicalities of what we might do next year.

I know Alison is dubious about part of this but it really does all depend on the weather.

The idea is that we might make the Douarnenez festival, the OGA 55 party and get home to Tollesbury.
The hard part is getting from Scilly to Ushant. The song Spanish Ladies has the distance as 35 leagues and Wikipedia says a nautical league is 3 nm and 105 nm looks about right. We've done nearly that as a coastal passage but this is across open sea, We would need perfect settled weather.

Douarnenez is the 25th to the 29th July so we have a lot of time to find a weather window, work permitting. The OGA event starts on the 16th August.

So there are 18 days to get from one to the other and its about 300 nm, depending on route. So we only need to average 16 miles a day. The longest legs are Paimpol to St Peter Port and Alderney to Weymouth - about 45 nm and 55 nm respectively so even in Robinetta they are day sails.

windfinder.com has statistics. There are nice charts of the average wind speed and direction for a given month.

They don't look too bad for May to July

https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/scilly

https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/ouessant

In particular Ouessant (Ushant) has mostly OK north-westerlies in May and July and gentler northerlies in June. It seems to never get south-easterlies in summer. Well, maybe.

The winds at Scilly are lighter but with more west in them. So we should be able to head south-east from Scilly at some point.

Now we need the repairs to go well, nice weather and lots of time off work!