First time Skipper across Biscay
We slipped out of Brighton Marina in early October intending to make a non-stop passage to A Coruña. We finally arrived in Baiona a month later, but what a lot of lessons Biscay and the Brittany Coast had taught me!
I’d sailed across Biscay four times before, but never as skipper, and not for a few years. But I knew the boat and crew were sound. Jalapeno is a Standfast 43, built in 1972 in the Netherlands by Frans Mass – a commercially coded sail training vessel (although this trip was non-commercial with friends), on which I had sailed the Fastnet race and many qualifying offshore races. Her rigging was under three years old, she’d had a replacement engine a year before, the main was new (second-hand) and we had a good selection of foresails for all conditions.
The weather in the UK had been pitiless in the two weeks leading up to departure, with strong south-westerly systems sweeping in one after the other and, sure enough, the worst conditions we had were in the English Channel within 24 hours of setting out.
We had been forecast variable Force 2-4 becoming southerly Force 4-6 then veering west or north-westerly increasing to Force 7 ‘at times, later’. The southerly got us nicely along the coast to near Portland Bill when the veer happened and we tacked. The wind stubbornly stuck at westerly and crept up through Force 6 and 7 to Force 7-8 by morning.
At dawn after our first night at sea, when I popped my head up through
