One hand gives the other takes away...

Pentland Firth, in terms of tide it could be described as rather similar to the gates of hell, and today saw me rack up a hat trick of passages through it!

With the lead of the fleet arriving before the turn of the tide, initially the notorious tidal gate offered us some serious assistance in recovering some of the miles we had lost during the previous 24 hours with our various misadventures with the kites.

We made some very good gains on the fleet, and spotting that most of the boats ahead had almost ceased making any head way to the east we gybed off north. Everything was going very well, until when the gybe was called the new working sheet managed to make its way under the boat.

We were doing the best part of 11 knots at the time and it took us a while to sort the sheet and get it rerun. The end result of which was that we ended up much further north than I wanted to go.

When we finally managed to gybe over we had created more miles that we had to sail. This in combination with several hours of a lack of any form of usable wind saw us slowly waving goodbye to the miles that we had gained.

Frustrating, very frustrating indeed.

Just to add insult to injury, I called a tack about 30 seconds too late, right in the tidal race. This saw Unicef and GREAT Britain sail right by while we fought a slow and painful fight to get out of the adverse tide.

Since rounding the top of Scotland the wind has steadily increased, and of course shifted so that it is coming from the exact direction we would like to go. This now sees us hard on the building breeze, preparing for the change in the weather.

With less than 400 nautical miles to Den Helder and the fleet tightly packed the upwind slog could shake positions up in any manner between here and the finish.

We have started to see oil and gas platforms now, and of course many fishing boats of the North Sea fleet that are an added challenge that we must pick our way through in closing stages of this epic round the world adventure.

IchorCoal OUT!