It was good to be underway as we were getting a little bit stircrazy! The forecast wasn't too promising for a good sail. The forecast has been promising for a long time but with our slight delay, the weather took the chance to change to light or no wind. Well, as many sailors have said, that's better than far too much wind in Biscay!

We did sail for a while though, and I was really enjoying it. It got even better when we pulled in the first of a decent haul of mackerel. They were soon turned into lunch and then pate to go with the freshly made sourdough bread. Yum! By this time we were out of mobile range and using the HF radio to update the map on this website, friends and family and get weather (thanks to Barry and Anthony, our trans-Atlantic crew for their emails!). It was all working rather well!

And rather boringly, it continued to. We pulled the sails down as the wind died and motored on into the first night. We opted to do 3 hour watches overnight, but there wasn't much going on at all. We saw a few boats, both on radar and AIS. We made up the pipeberth in the saloon so the off watch person was nearby but they were never needed. In a rather pleasing way, it was all rather boring :)

Next day, the sea was flat. Really flat. We saw 4 lots of dolphins in all, one pod playing right under the bows for a while. As we closed on Viveiro, we got some more wind, but by the time we'd got the sails up, it has died again. Very frustrating! So we ended up with a long slow motor into the ria. So we'd crossed Biscay. It took us 56hours with about 50hours of motoring. We had 2 nights at sea - our longest crossing yet. What was more rewarding was arriving in Viveiro feeling relaxed and refreshed. We'd been able to shower underway, keep family updated and everything had worked very nicely. The first 1/3rd of the "start of the start" was complete. Now for Spain and Portugal and then the big jump out to the Canaries!