Left-over seas

The chances are that some time this season half of us will find ourselves holed up in some faraway port while the usual mid-holiday gale blows itself out. It’s tempting to stick one’s nose past the mole as soon as the wind drops to force 4, but if the heavy stuff has had an onshore component there will be no fun to be had straight away. Typically, we could find ourselves in a falling breeze ‘going up and down in the same hole’ for anything up to 24 hours. The answer, of course, is to select a bolt-hole with a good pub, a nice beach, a multiplex cinema or a casino with distracted croupiers. That is real passage planning…