Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

So it took a few more days before Dignity did set sail. She left sometime in the morning yesterday. Right now she’s making her way across the Bay of Biscay. Distance covered each day is not great so far. I am assuming this is due to the less than ideal conditions. Once she rounds the NW tip of Portugal I’m hoping headway will improve.

I understand there are two possible stops en route. One in Portugal and one in the Canaries.

In the meantime I have found some more interesting websites.

This one is mesmerizing. It provides an animated forward prediction of wave heights. At time of writing it looks like something nasty arrives in the Bay of Biscay in a couple of days. Hope Dignity and her crew can make it out in time.

This one shows wind directions over the Atlantic. At time of writing you can see how the prevailing winds will be in our favour once we round the top of Portugal.

Final thing. The boat manual arrived today. I am going to have an excellent evening pouring over diagrams. What more could I want? A boat of course.

Each day now sees us looking at the weather in La Rochelle, France as well as the website that tells us where Dignity is. On the latter, there is, at best, one uplink per day. Recently this has been about 3pm GMT. There also seems to be a lag between when the measurement is taken and when we get to see it. Each day, so far, her position hasn’t changed as the captain and crew wait for favourable weather.

Yesterday there was a surge of excitement as Dignity had in fact moved. All of 0.03 nautical miles. Progress at last. Looking closely it looks like she was moved to dock.

The weather forecast for the area appears to be getting better although the winds are forecast from WSW for as far out as they go which means if she sails soon, they’ll no doubt have to motor and pound their way into wind. At the end of the day, the safety of the captain and crew is more important than our plans so we’ll just watch, wait and if necessary, work out what we’ll do if we get to the BVIs first.

In about 3 hours, we should know more.

No updates for a while as my Microsoft Expression demo license ran out and my paid for replacement copy hasn’t yet arrived. I have also had to send my laptop back for repair as the lid was cracking.

Yesterday I learned that the satellite transponder has been hooked up on Dignity so I can now tell where she is. As of about midday GMT today, Dignity has not set sail from Les Sables-d’Olonne but I do know the captain came aboard last Saturday and the crew arrived on Sunday.

I’ve downloaded the Expression demo onto another PC at home so I could play around with google maps. There should be one on the home page for this site – at least there was when I last tested.

Yesterday we splashed Timeless. This year we’re going to use her to get the rest of my family more familiarized with points of sail before we sail Dignity on June 22^nd (hopefully). My son Sam came with me. He succeeded in solo sailing Timeless in a full circle.