Scafell pike

The goal on scafell pike was to get up and down quickly enough that there would still be enough water in the outer harbour to allow us to sail out, avoiding a 5 hour wait on a whitehaven harbour mudbank as we did in 2008. The small draught of eads innovation works really helped here. We have such a shallow draught of something like 1.6m that we had the first oak all to ourselves. All the other boats had to wait at least another 10 minutes for the water level to rise to provide clearance for their keels. And so is was that we were the first runners off.
We seen to have a fan club composed of members of my family. We saw my nieces and their mum and dad at various headlands along the lleyn peninsula. While we were anchored off whitehaven i got a text message from my mum saying that she was waiting for us in whitehaven. She met us as we pulled alongside and then at the marshalls' control point on the dock side. She had spent the night waiting for us in her car until 3:30am which was really sweet and showed real commitment to the cause.
The start of the run was inauspicious. The run starts with an 18 mile bike ride for which bikes are useful. We were carrying our bikes on board and with eads innovation works being so small we did not have space to fully assemble them before we set off. Assembly took longer than expected with gary frantically tending to bikes: a whirlwind of spanners and pumps. Despite his best efforts we exceeded our scrutineering time and ate into our mountain time.
The cycling itself just seemed like hard work. It just felt uphill all the way which in reality it was. We took 1h22m on the bikes: probably longer than any previous year.
Walking was pretty desperate after the biking let alone running. We did get into a post of rhythm on the uphill track to black sail youth hostel, getting there in just over 30 minutes. A stiff climb up to black sail pass on heavy legs and i run down the other side say us at wasdale head. Wasdale head was packed with minibuses of teams doing the three peaks challenge (where the same peaks are climbed but you drive between them: it doesn't take quite as long as our three peaks yacht race!). Everyone seemed to be having fun: maybe not the ones hobbling. The other three peakers helped us in the fog as their banter helped us find the route in the fog. It was a hard slog up but we were rewarded not only with the checkpoint but also sunshine above the clouds. We descended carefully getting back to wasdale head 1h50m after setting off up from there: this seemed like a reasonable run to us and bang on our prediction. More painful running over black sail pass and then some quite good running down ennerdale saw us to the youth hostel with an overall running time of 4h22m.
The bike ride back started with a vicious hill that took the wind out of us. After this it was downhill all the way. We took the same time on the way back as the way out. This was probably caused by the hill that shall not be mentioned and a puncture (that martin swiftly repaired).
The sailors met us at the dock and we moved quickly onto the boat, slipped the lines and heade for the lock. After a little wait we were in the lock. The lock dropped and we were out. I could barely watch as we chugged through the harbour. This was where elation turned into despair when we grounded in 2008. I saw the depth sounder bottom out at 0.1m: 10cm below the keel. There was relief when the depth increased and we passed through the harbour walls: we were out.
We were the only boat to make it out on the tide: although a boat called the dockers made an attempt about an hour after us. I think their attempt was doomed to failure as they had 30cm more keel than us and the tide would have receded. We are now sailing nicely at about 5 knots towards the mull of galloway. The lake district is receding into the distance. It is unlikely that any of the other boats will have left yet but we know that they will be chasing us down. We just have to sail as well as we can and ride our luck, hoping they don't catch us before corpach. We are being philosophical about our chances.