We are planning to circumnavigate Britain. The basic plan is to sail Silver Mist, a 32ft Westerly Fulmar, clockwise around Britain in the summer of 2010. The navigation should be straightforward: turn right out of Cardiff Bay and keep the land on our right hand side until we get back....More seriously, we intend to cross the Irish sea from Milford Haven and head up the east coast of Ireland then over to the west coast of Scotland to go around Cape Wrath and the Pentland Firth and down the east coast of mainland Britain until we get to the Channel. Then it is along the Channel to Lands End and back into the Bristol Channel and home.

We intend to make it a leisurely sail with minimal heroics, so we are allowing ourselves three months (May, June and July). We intend to do the 1800 mile trip with day sails (averaging 30 miles per day) and no night sails, though there will doubtless be plenty of early starts or late arrivals.

We have done a basic passage plan which shows that we have allowed for 60 days actually sailing. This means we sail two days out of three on average and that we can afford to sit in the pub when the weather turns nasty and wait for it to pass over. We do not intend to take the short cut through the Caledonian Canal unless the weather is particularly foul and/or we are running very short of time. We would like to anchor more often than the passage plan shows and use fewer marinas but we thought it was a good standby to know they were available.

By the end of May we should be rounding the top of Scotland and by the end of June we should be off the Suffolk coast. We aim to start on the 2nd or 3rd of May. Silver Mist is well equipped with a cooker, fridge, hot water and shower so we can keep ourselves in relative comfort.

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