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Leg 18 Lowestoft to Eastbourne - A long day
Today was a very long day… departed Lowestoft at 5am and arrived at Eastbourne at about 6pm.
The forecast today was rubbish. It predicted f3 or less and sea state smooth or slight. It turned out F5 and a slight to moderate. I am so pleased I left so early as the last 5 hours were bashing into waves at 6kts and very hard work and exhausting. i suspect tomorrow won’t be any different.
It was a very exciting day though and one of the most enjoyable from a boating point of view. I had to transit the Thames estuary which is one of the busiest shipping concentrations in the world. I decided not to plan the route precisely prefering to see what the traffic was like before deciding how to get through. As it turned out there were only a few ships around and the route was very straight forward between two cardinals. None the less, there may not have been many ships there when I arrived but the evidence of them being there earlier was there in the form of their wakes and one wake I came across was a wave about 1.5m high and I had to study it for a while before deciding how I would cross it. It was a whopper! There was no sign of the ship that caused it though.
Crossing the entrances to Dover required caution and a call to the Dover port control was well worth the effort.
So, two more legs and tomorrow is to Poole where I may have to wait out the next weather system delaying my final leg and my return to Plymouth… I must be patient!
