After all the sun and blue skies of the South Atlantic and even passing the equator and all the way up to Finisterre the gales that are hammering us now shouldn’t come as a surprise, we have a North easterly force 9, strangely enough the pressure is going up at midnight the glass was reading 1033 , and the temperature was 18, a change from the 30’s we were getting last week. It is the Bay of Biscay after all, once described to me as the Bag of Biscuits more like the bag of shite tonight.
Our speed has been reduced from 15 to 11 knots, but it’s all relative really a container ship overtook us doing 20 knots and we overtook a cargo ship doing 5, I was observing the poor bastard through the binoculars only doing 5 knots getting chucked about the gaff life a cork, as the lads on the bridge of the container ship were probably thinking the same of us.
The big red patch sitting on the corner of Iberia is the forecast area Fitzroy (formerly Finisterre from 1949 to 2002), named after Robert FitzRoy the British meteorologist and mentor of Beaufort, there must be a bit of Irish in there being a Fitz, although fairly diluted by blue blood, Beaufort was of course Irish. I suppose being Irish and interested in the weather is not strange as it is the national obsession. We find us as I write in the right hand upper corner of the red square, the wind is howling outside and veering to ENE force 8. Sleep might not be so easy although the weather is on the bow so there is not so much rolling.
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