We had lighter winds yesterday, but still made reasonable progress until after dinner.  It had been cloudy all day,  we had some squalls in the afternoon which had us reefing and unreefing a bit, I had made another Moroccan chicken dish in the morning, we haven’t enough cous cous left so I made rice to go with it and some cabbage as a vegetable. As it had been so cloudy we hadn’t had much charge into the batteries and as I passed up the dinner I noticed that the batteries were now at 23 Volts so the engine was started for charging purposes. We still had about 10 knots of wind so were pootling along at about 5 knots. After dinner, once I’d had seconds and washed up I came back up. The wind went to the SSE and fell to about 8 knots. After some mucking about I ended up furling the genoa (as it was not filling consistently but backing and filling and banging against the shrouds)  and pulling the main fully out with the preventer. Once I’d done this the wind fell to about 5 knots. We were down to about 1.5 knots and after a short time  with even the main backing and filling,  I ended up putting the engine on again and motoring. We did this until about 0130 this morning by which time a light Northerly wind had picked up. We have been playing with this ever since, currently we’re heading 045 - the right direction now, at about 4 knots, it fills and drops frustratingly. The forecast seems to think, though, that this area of light winds is the horse latitudes and once through it we could well be into the Westerlies. Here’s hoping.
It’s a Saturday today so we’ll treat ourselves to some extra snacks with sundowners, we have four packets enough for twice a week so we’ve nominated Tuesdays as honorary Saturdays to consume the extra packets.
Longbow, the Bowman 48 In  the regatta with us and Pancakes, the Bowman 45 are due to leave in a day or two, Longbow was paying for a personalised forecaster to assist them across to Horta so it will be interesting to see how they get on in comparison to ourselves using just the predictwind package. Hopefully we’ll be in an out before them.
Time to make porridge again,
Slainte, Jock, Patrick and Yemaya