More Wind Coming

We’re now romping along at about 7 and a half knots, we put the full main up this morning after a night running on just the poled out genoa and the wind has picked up to about 15 knots from the port beam. We are heading just South of West to ensure we don’t get sucked into the area of low winds to the North of us. It’s looking like reasonable  winds for today and tomorrow and stronger winds, up to about 20 knots for Thursday. I’m not quite sure how we’ll adjust the sail plan for that but suspect it will either be a 2 reefed main and genoa of whatever size seems appropriate or no main and the genoa of whatever size.

Life aboard goes on in our routine, Alastair is in the forward cabin, Stephen in the saloon and I’m lounging about in the stateroom aft. We are doing watches of 3 hours on and 6 hours off which works well through the night but during the day no one can ever remember who is on or off as we tend to all be up and about anyway and then when we’ve had our sundowner of one drink and chat and then dinner we have to go back to remembering when we were on watch the previous night to work out when we’re on watch tonight.

We are  also just at the point now of forgetting which stories we have already told to each other so the element of repetition is creeping in I’m suspecting that  this will get worse at the days go by.

Last night’s dinner was a moroccan chicken dish which, despite my forgetting the almonds, was delicious, the recipe is in the lifeboat cookery book if anyone is interested. The salad at lunch worked well but we no longer have much lettuce left. I’m not sure why but the unopened lettuce was in far worse condition than the open one. We still have a little lettuce left but the cucumber is finished, much of it having gone mushy. The peppers are lasting well as are the apples and tangerines and most veg apart from the carrots which never made it past anyones lips.

We’re passing close to the longitude of the Cape Verde Isles at the moment but a little North of them and if all goes well they'll be astern tomorrow.

So far the. batteries and solar panels and autopilot are doing their things quite well, we’ve had to start the engine a few times to move at all and this had topped up the batteries a little and for the last two nights we’ve had to run the engine in neutral for an hour and a half to top them up, we’ve not had particularly sunny days as yet which is kind to the bald patches but  less good for the batteries.

Stephen managed a good (ish) sun sight in the morning yesterday and an accurate Latitude at noon giving not a bad position yesterday, I’m not familiar with the yottie style of sun sight  calculation using sight reduction tables but am getting the hang of it, and it is certainly a good bit easier than what I’m used to, particularly the calculation of the sun’s bearing for which I normally use ABC tables from my nautical tables book.

I now have to choose a new book to start having finished ‘Wager’ which was a very good tale. I think it may be one on pirates that I’ve brought away with me. I still have about 3 or 4 Thomas Kydd books to read from the series of them by Julian Stockwin - recommended to me by a pilot friend Simon, I have to say I believe them to be excellent if not  better than that, - a Hornblower type  series but I’m saving those up because I binge read quite a few of them and don’t want to get to the end of the series although I’m hopeful that he will still keep bashing them out for a year or two.

Today’s run noon to noon was 118 miles which I had hoped may be a little more and we now have a waypoint in at St Maarten and the distance to go is 2172.

Slainte

Jock and the boys.