It was a beautiful morning for the start on Sunday 4 June, though not a lot of wind meant slow progress out of Plymouth Sound all in each others wind shadow. Once clear many boats set pretty coloured down wind sails and slowly pulled away. We were feeling a bit rusty and the cruising chute hadn’t been out of the bag in 2 years so we contented ourselves with playing with the wind vane steering. Later it would have been too windy anyway. We enjoyed a favourable wind giving a broad reach or occasionally a run until Wednesday afternoon. It changed direction so that we were close hauled sailing as close to the wind as we could. Off Finisterre it died away so we started the engine and motorsailed, later able to sail again as it came back. With our small engine we can’t motor into a big sea with any speed, it’s faster to sail. Wednesday night and Thursday it was quite hard work tacking back and fore, there were several squalls and cloudbursts to contend with. We were pleased to arrive in Bayona at 16.27 local time (in the middle of another cloudburst) and we’re grateful for the welcome from World Cruising yellow shirts Alvaro and Bev. A few days later at the prizegiving dinner we were absolutely astonished to find that we had placed 1st in Division B. This was entirely due to our having used our engine a lot less than our competitors and therefore got less time penalties. The other slightly smaller Westerly yacht, Pirates Moon from Guernsey, placed 3rd so it was definitely a case of Westerlys rule!