Strategy

18 March 2020

To get from the Azores to the Strait of Gibraltar, you want to sail to the Portuguese coast first. Then you will start sailing south. When you want to go from the Azores to the Netherlands, this will be exactly what you do not want to do. Unfortunately you cannot control everything. We were almost at the Portuguese coast when we got the news that going to the Mediterranean was not an option anymore.

In fact, there is only one possibility to get out of this situation: you turn around and go west. You will search for a low-pressure area to start sailing to the north. But there was also a nice high-pressure area from our position exactly to Brest. But this area would be pushed away by the next depression. With a lot of luck we could arrive in Brest just in time. We decided that we deserved some luck and took the chance.

With a lot of revs on the engine, we started sailing to Bretagne in a straight line. The weather forecast changed all the time and after two days of sailing our time window seemed to small. Time for a new plan! Maybe to the west anyway?

It seems that the Southside of the Bay of Biscay remains relatively calm and that the depression will settle around Finisterre. So, if we dive as deep as possible into the Bay of Biscay we will get an easterly wind and a high wall. That would be nice!

At this moment we are sailing to the east to get as close as possible to the French south-west coast. Later on we will sail north along this coast. We will look for a bay nearby Brest to wait for a window to cross the English Channel towards Rotterdam. For that, the forecast is far from ideal, but as we said before, it changes all the time…