TL;DR – We worry a lot, and it almost always turns out ok.
The Bay of Biscay is a ~300 mile crescent scooped out of the west coast of France. It has a nasty reputation – open to several thousand miles of wind fetch, ocean swells can stack up on the shallow depths of the inner bay and become dangerous to small boats.
Even though we’ve sailed a fair distance by now, we tend to take crossings of large bodies of water like Biscay fairly seriously. There are plenty of stories of sailors coming to grief on its waters and requiring rescue, and we didn’t want to add to the literature. So, we spent many days watching the weather, looking for a good window to head to northern France.
Should we go? Shouldn’t we go? This forecast makes the waves look reasonable, but the wind is from the wrong direction. That forecast shows the wind from the right direction, but the waves look uncomfortably big. It’s easy to get stuck in an endless loop of forecast analysis – there’s almost always a hint of a better looking forecast a few days or a week away.
In the end, we found a forecast that looked reasonably OK – the wind and waves would be good for the first half, and the second half would have bigger waves with Madrone punching upwind. And unusually, the conditions we saw were actually a bit more mild than what was forecast.
We’re happy to be lucky in this case!
