Days 106 and 107…. both red line days, both bad weather days, both no sail days….both hoover the boat and do all the laundry days! 9th and 10th September 2018.

Sunday and Monday have been truly dreadful weather days…. I won’t mention the shades of grey, the gloom…. but we have had everything except ice, snow and sunshine. Now getting difficult to remember when the sun last came out in Scotland…. and we have been in Scotland for 55 days ( nearly two months ) since we first landed at Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre way back on 17th July. The sun shone on that day!

Most weather forecasts are now agreeing…. low pressure cell to the north… so strong winds up to Gale Force 8 and 9…. heavy rain… it has almost become a race to try and escape from Scotland… there must be line somewhere south of us where this bad stuff fades out and we get to enjoy some of the nice, pleasant warm weather the south is currently experiencing.

So what do do? Yes each day we draw up our escape plan… the passage plan south… then compare and discuss ad nauseam all the different forecasts…. tear up the plan… frustration.

So we do boat jobs… and here in Peterhead walk miles and miles to the shops and a pub for a meal….. do the laundry, hoover out the boat…. yes with a hoover! and generally try and maintain Poli Poli in as good a condition as we can…. in the pouring rain. As I type this… at 9pm at night…. the rain is hammering down on the boat.

Poli Poli is centre right below the North Sea oil rigs support and supply ship. Our escape route is clear…out the marina gap on the left, across Peterhead Bay to the outer harbour entrance, turn right and head south….couldn’t be easier!!!!

One point of interest today… last night we noticed the arrival of a very large, peculiar looking catamaran …. peculiar in as much as it had Polynesian type markings on the two hulls, strange flags and up turned pointy bow and stern … both times two. I noticed a number of wet suits ( the garments divers use ) laid out as if to dry on the fore deck ( impossible to dry anything outdoors here in Peterhead ).

Well this strange vessel left this morning at 10am….. and we were informed that it was the support vessel for the Round Britain swimmer …. Ross Edgley’s Great British Swim…. he is attempting to swim 2,000 miles around Britain in 100 days. Well he has just reached Peterhead in 100 days and he has 500 miles to finish in Margate or Ramsgate. So he is also somewhat behind. Ross has been in the news on the BBC recently.

As we understand it Ross swims for 6 hours with the tide, then rests on the support boat for six hours until the tide changes again…. then swims another six hours with tide and so on. He never gets off the boat. We heard that he has now got problems with being in salt water for so much of the time… and ingesting sea water. This has caused bits of his tongue to drop off…. so we heard!! Google…. Ross Edgley.

As we did on on Saturday night when we arrived here…. we made a passage plan to escape from Peterhead. We did that again on Sunday evening… and have done again tonight. The 6am Met Office forecast tomorrow will probable kill off our hard work. On the general land forecasts for the UK on the BBC they are talking of winds in excess of 60 miles per hour for the next two days. Three bad weather days in Peterhead??? Unthinkable! So so frustrating.