Friday 14th August- Day 50

LAND!!!

What a last 24 hours!

Yesterday started cloudy, foggy and damp, but for once it was actually really warm, so even the greyness couldn’t dampen our spirits.

Then the cloud began to break and the sun came through, giving us an absolutely glorious day on the water.

The wind we’d been promised never really arrived. We had little more than a very light breeze, but importantly it was behind us, so despite fighting the tide we were still able to make slow but steady progress.

And then, at around 9pm, with roughly 30 nautical miles to go…

LAND!

We could actually see it.

After 50 days at sea, there it was on the horizon.

It’s difficult to describe what that feels like. For weeks the UK has been a destination on a chart, then slowly it started appearing on the edge of the plotter screen. The mileage kept coming down and we knew logically that it was there.

But actually seeing it with our own eyes is completely different.

A real coastline.

Home.

We were still a long way from being able to relax though, because as darkness fell we had one of the most important navigational challenges of the crossing ahead of us.

Crossing the TSS

We needed to cross the Traffic Separation Scheme, or TSS.

The easiest way to describe a TSS is as a huge motorway for ships. Traffic travelling in one direction uses one lane, traffic travelling in the opposite direction uses another, with a separation zone between them.

And we needed to get from one side to the other.

The rules require us to cross the traffic lanes on a heading as nearly as practicable at 90 degrees to the direction of traffic, so there was no sneaking diagonally across.

It felt like a real-life game of Frogger — if anyone is old enough to remember the early Atari game where you had to get a frog across multiple lanes of traffic without getting squashed!

Except our version involved Penny B…

And some considerably larger vehicles!

It took us a full six hours, from around midnight until 6am, to get completely across.

Needless to say, neither of us got any sleep.

Even when one of us was technically off shift, there was no switching off. It was constant AIS monitoring, checking alarms, watching lights, assessing vessels and making sure we knew exactly what was happening around us.

But we did it.

Safe and sound, and out the other side.

And almost perfectly timed, the sun began to rise.

With daylight came an even clearer view of the coastline.

What a sight.

After 50 days of looking at nothing but ocean, sky and the inside of Penny B, suddenly there is land everywhere we look ahead of us.

Now our next challenge has arrived…

The Tide Has Taken Over

If you look at our tracker today, you might wonder why on earth our track has suddenly started bending north rather than heading directly towards where we want to go.

The answer is simple.

The tide.

It is incredibly powerful here and there’s absolutely no point exhausting ourselves trying to fight something we simply can’t overpower.

So we’re working with it.

Our aim now, with around 13 nautical miles to go to our first stop, is to get in towards the coast as quickly as we can and find shallower water where the tidal stream should have less influence on us.

If we can get sufficiently tucked in, hopefully we’ll be able to continue making progress even when the tide isn’t in our favour.

And if we can’t?

We wait.

At around 2pm, the tide should turn and we can ride it in instead.

That’s the beauty of finally reaching coastal waters.

For weeks there has often been only one plan: deal with whatever the Atlantic gives us.

Now we have options.

Plan A. Plan B.

And, if necessary, an anchor that can actually reach the bottom!

So all is very well aboard Penny B this morning.

Are we tired?

Absolutely.

After a night with zero sleep, we’re shattered.

But right now the excitement is winning.

Because after 50 days at sea, thousands of miles of rowing, headwinds, counter currents, fog, rain, parachute anchors, broken oars, a knockdown and more three-hour shifts than I care to count…

We can see land.

Now we just have to get there!

Dawn

“Together Paul and I are rowing home — the long way round.”

Hometown Row

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