Just like the summer

We left London at 0530 for the seven and abit hour drive to Largs. It was strange returning to Pixie after a break of 6 weeks, familiar yet alien at the same time. It was bright sunshine when we arrived, but the wind was blowing 30 odd knots and gusting to the mid 40s.

We decided to stay in Largs and work on the talk about our trip that we're going to do on Monday night for the White Horse Cruising club. Being back on Pixie and looking back at the photographs, it was almost like we'd never left, we soon got back into our old routine.

Kirsty's parents took us out for dinner in the evening which was the perfect end to a long day.

This morning we had a leisurely start, the wind was still whistling through the marina when we woke up, so there was no rush to get out of bed. Although I did make a quick visit to see what the maximum wind strength was overnight. 50.3 knots!

We went up for showers and afterwards I was waiting for Kirsty when my old colleague Simon Jinks appeared. He was doing some instructing and a crowd gathered to watch him extract their 41 ft Hanse out of her berth in 40 knots of wind.

After blowing at least 30 knots and gusting up to 48, by 3pm the wind had dropped to nothing until so we decided to go out and sail if we could. As we came to leave our berth the wind went up to 20 knots to keep me on my toes! We got out with no problems and, no wind at all.

We motored to the north of Great Cumbrae, and within a minute the wind was up to 28 knots! So we put 2 reefs in the main and unfurled some genoa and went sailing!



Here's the history of our Garmin true wind speed data

The wind went up to a constant 32-33 knots just forward of the beam. In no time at all the flat water was turned into a mogul field of 1 meter waves, with lots of spray flying around. The wind maxed out at 34 knots which Pixie rounded up into, can't blame her for that, it was blowing.

Top speed through the water was 9.8 knots. When we got north of Rothsay and the wind died. On went the engine and we motored up East Kyle, wind came and went all the way up.

We're now anchored north of Bute. The stars are out in their thousands. It's still gusting 20 knots occasionally. But the water's flat, although we've just had a 180° wind shift, the food is good, the beer is fine and the company is the best