Guernsey to Alderney 46 nm
Monday 21 July
When sailing anywhere in the Channel Islands you have to check your tide charts carefully.
In Jersey the tidal range is up to 12 meters (40 ft) and if you’re heading out at Springs you can have up to 7 knots of tide against you, or with you. Fortunately it’s Neap tides just now.
We checked our tides for heading North to Alderney but we also had to take into account the timing of the sill out of our marina as there’s plenty of time when we can’t get over it.
In order to have 2.5m over the sill (we draw 2.3 so being careful) we had to wait until 1.15 pm before we could leave.
We were promised a force 5 Westerly freshening to a force 6 ‘imminently’ – so we put 2 reefs in the main and thought we’d give our cutter jib a go.
The skies were quite forbidding and it looked squally.
But La Bamba seemed to have her own little circle of sunshine – we could see rain elsewhere, but we got hardly a drop.
We thought about shaking out a reef or swapping to the bigger jib as we felt a bit under-powered with the winds barely touching 20 knots, but there was quite a big swell – the rollers come all the way across the Atlantic – and we thought that as soon as we increase sail the force 6 will kick in.
The force 6 finally arrived about half way there and I made 11 knots with 24-26knots of wind.
It helped us to storm up the Alderney Race at 10-11 knots over the ground – we came through once the tide had slackened off a bit.
We had to beat round the corner into Alderney harbour and the rocks and huge waves were all too familiar!
We were helped onto a buoy by the harbour taxi (he works until midnight) but had a rather uncomfortable night moving around on the swells and I’m sure we had a troll living in our forward locker banging the anchor chain…
