Wednesday 10 March

El Vigo departed Stornoway 1300, 8th March, arrived Stromness 1200 9th.
 

You've to catch a tide to get through Hoy Sound, to Stromness unless you can swim or sail or power-up faster than it. El Vigo couldn't so that's what we call a tidal gate. The navigation is easy - you just have to find speed to reach the gate while it's still
open.
 

El Vigo - Night sailing

We made it, diesel-assisted through parts of the night when the wind fell light. But the forecast Southeasterly came good and worked with a the forecast southeasterly came good and worked with a fair tide to get us through in time.
 

Cold and beautiful noon in Stromness. Thinking of the quiet and timeless art of George Mackay Brown, that poem of his when the yole is sailing under and the old guy just sucks at his pipe between his teeth. And all I've got to worry about is continuing problems with contamination in fuel and fresh-water tanks and lines.

Thinking also of the precedence of other voyagers. Ricky Demarco hiring a ship and bringing a pile of the appropriate people aboard. Just going visiting - and it's not only landscape, seascape,  it's people. So we're getting R and R at Puck's flat in the former lighthouse-keepers' cottages. And it looks like a session tonight, brace of concertinas, flute, fiddles, a trained singer (who's also a diver, potentially the handiest person a sailor can meet) and maybe some untrained stories.
 

Looking for parts

The wind is still fresh from the southeast and we'll need a shift or an easing to let us through the Firth to the sea-route south. So it's repair day. Here's a bit of yesterday's log. A log is a line trolled behind a vessel, marking pace through the water and a poem isn't that different.
 

Hoy Sound

Another old man wincing at sun.
He's out of the fast
air with east in it,
the stream that's driving us
against the piling water's run.

Our lead sail's assumed power
letting us lean to get the sharp
and pertinent shoulder cutting
the deeper, easier middle,

secure to take in the Palomino
manes, ranging but never alone
and the platinum Munro bob
break-dancing, Stromness-style.