It’s been 22 days and some hours since Temptress arrived in Alcaidesa Marina, La Linea, Spain. In the intervening period, both her crew have spent hours weather watching and reading reports of orca “interactions“. Neither have made pleasant reading at times but now it seems the weather gods have relented with the long range forecast looking relatively ok though it will be a beat north until we reach the Western Approaches. Meanwhile the pods of orcas who chew rudders appear to have moved along the coast to the Portuguese-Spanish border off the Rio Guadiana, a reasonable distance north of our intended route.

Tomorrow night we depart from Belfast on a flight to Gatwick from where, after a few hours sleep in the Premier Inn, we catch the early morning flight to Gibraltar. Assuming Easyjet convey us as promised, the rest of Saturday will be spent provisioning for the few days it will take us to sail to Cascais, near Lisbon and hoisting the genoa on to the forestay again.

Between now and Friday evening there are few things to do – a sailing committee meeting at Donaghadee SC for Susie, tidying up and handing over projects at work for Kevin and of course packing the bits of laundry we brought with us at the beginning of the month together with the loo pump spares and M&S extra strong tea bags. The latter being the skipper’s preferred cuppa.

Early Sunday morning we intend to depart for the inshore route to Cadiz, keeping well with in the 20m contour where we can. It should take most of the daylight hours as its just over 70 nautical miles. From there Temptress will head north west to Cabo Sao Vincent at the western end of the Algarve, about 24 hours sailing, then another full days sailing should bring us to Cascais around 110nm further north sometime on Tuesday.

On Wednesday our crew, Erica will join us in Cascais for the sail north. She last sailed with us from Grenada to Panama back in January 2016 . It will be great to spend time together again however let’s hope erupting volcanoes and gps woes won’t be part of our next voyage (if you want to know more you’ll have to read our blog posts from back then)!