Hello Martin,

We have a 23 metre Leopard sports boat in Antibes, and one possible adventure for next year is to take it to the UK around Easter for a summer in the UK, and take it back down in late summer. This has attracted plenty of enthusiasm from some boaty friends, yet I have some trepidation (well, lots!) hence an email to you. I've read one email response you gave advising that Easter is NOT a good time to make the passage north with NNW winds so I suppose the questions are:

1) If not at Easter - when is a good time to make the trip? What about May, for example? How long does the stormy period last - or is it story of relentless big seas until June or July? Of course, I can back off from a planned trip, leave the boat with one crew in a port (Gib etc) and come back a week or so later

2) One super-enthusiastic friend reckons we should use any good weather window as much as possible, take spare fuel and a pump to extend the range, stay offshore and drive through the night, albeit perhaps at lower speeds, and bang on to complete the trip in a week. With a useable range of say 450 miles at 22 knots, plus perhaps another 100 miles with spare fuel and a pump - is this at all feasible?

3) What's the sort of timeframe that you would look for to make the trip and how many crew?

cheers Matt Steadman.

Dear Matt,

Thank you for your email, Your plans are by no means over ambitious, but I completely understand your trepidation! I do feel that Easter may not be a good time to do it. We get a lot of equinoctial gales at that time of year. I think that May would be better; the only disadvantage of May is that we usually experience north easterly winds at that time of year in the English Channel, but they are not usually very strong and so should not slow you down too much.

Whilst staying offshore and continuing though the night is a good idea, there are problems associated with carrying extra fuel. Presumably you are thinking of carrying a couple of 40 gallon drums, these can be very difficult to secure and must be completely secure so as not to damage the boat in the event of a gale. A loose fuel drum is as frightening as a loose cannon! If you have room in your engine room a bolted down extra fuel tank would be better, you could pump out of that and into your main fuel tanks.

My advice when travelling at night would be to be 15 to 20 miles offshore as you cruise up the west coast of Portugal and Spain, that way you avoid most of the lobster pot buoys but are not too far out for turning towards ‘ports of refuge’ and for your re-fuelling stops. For re-fuelling I would recommend the Balearics, Gibraltar, Vilamoura, Leixoes (Porto), La Coruna and Brest. There is less than 450 miles between these places and so if your useable range is 450 miles then you should be able to do it without spare fuel. All the above places have airports and so if you get held up by a gale you could easily leave the boat and go home and come back as soon as you have a good forecast.

As to how many crew you should have, this depends very much on their experience. You could do it with two experienced crew, each of you doing three hours on and having six hours off. Or if all your crew are relatively inexperienced then I would advise four crew and divide them into two four hour watches but with yourself not doing a watch at all, but available to advise both watches. My instructions to my inexperienced crew would be to wake me up immediately if any vessel or any other target for that matter should come within four miles on your radar. You would save quite a lot of fuel if you use the Raz de Sein and the Chenal du Four, but I would advise that you plan to pass through them in daylight and that you have on board the large scale paper chart of both these channels and of the approaches to Brest. Given good weather all the way you could complete the trip in a week, but if you have to wait for a gale or two to pass then it could take two weeks, perhaps a little longer.

I recommend that if you haven’t got Navtex that you install it, I find it very useful for navigation warnings such as buoys that are out of position, containers, floating logs, dead whales etc that have been reported by other vessels with their position. Please get in touch again if you have any more questions - I would also like to hear from you as to how you get on with this passage. If you stop at Vilamoura, please telephone me on 965800702, I would be pleased to meet you and may also be able to help you with a forecast for the west coast.

With my very best wishes to you for a successful trip.

Martin Northey.