23rd Aug Update

Wed 22nd
A grey day! We left La Rochelle about 7am local time and the weather was very heavy, overcast & grey. We had also topped up the water tanks in port & that was a mistake – it didn’t taste very nice at all. Thank goodness for bottled water (MW), we have now pumped out all the tank and refilled with really sweet water here in Port Medoc – not quite as sweet as Scottish rain water but close to it. Anyway back to the grey day – the water was an even darker grey than the skies and it didn’t get any better; we’ve now had 2 days in lang breeks & simmits (the weather must improve soon). It was a reasonable sail down to Port Medoc but the seas were still quite big – it had been over a week in port so we were both looking a bit grey. There is a warning in the pilot book not to enter into the Girronde estuary during the ebb and it looked like we were going to be early. So we put some sail away and tried to slow down – but the wind picked up – and so the seas didn’t get any less.. and we were still going to be early ! But back to the grey day – just at the entrance to the channel which starts about 4 miles out from the estuary - a big grey ship was charging our way…… It circled us a couple of times, taking pictures and generally checking us out then turned and pulled up as close as his blues eyes thought he could get and shouted us on the loudhailer to switch to channel 10 on the radio. We had a chat over the radio (the very nice French Customs man & me) about where were we from (Oban --- ‘can you spell that please’..), a few other questions and then the crunch ‘Have you been checked by French Customs since you got here?’ Reply – ‘No, Sir we have not!’ silence for a few seconds then ‘Standby on channel 10..’ they must have been tossing euros to see who they were going to send over -- anyway we won because the came back on the radio to say that they were happy for us to carry on. That would have been an interesting boat transfer if they had decided to come over for a look. However that was the first visit from F. Customs – others we have spoken to have been boarded 3 times.

Thurs 23rd
Port Medoc is a new marina that is improving its facilities for visiting yachts but still lacks any shops for normal things like food and milk, hopefully that will change soon. WiFi is not very good here and we have to walk up and sit outside the office to get reasonable signal – when it was good in L Rochelle it was very good and just before we left Carolyn had a chance to make a few phone calls via skype and I had a very good chat with nephew Craig on Windows Messenger.
We’ve checked the weather (grib files and magic seaweed) and we’re heading off to Santander tomorrow morning and should be there by Saturday evening – watch this space. Oh , it’s real by the way – check it out http://magicseaweed.com I wasn’t kidding!
One other thing has been hurricane Dean over in the Bahamas and there abouts – our friends Dave & Nora are over that way in their boat and we hope that they are OK. We tried to get in touch but haven’t heard yet.