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Pajarito - Day 11 - Patience



Have patience, grasshopper, for Tortola will come. We've reached 22 degrees north latitude and are approximately 200 miles north of Tortola. So close, and yet so far! We're all pretty anxious to get into port. We expect to reach our waypoint 35 miles north of Tortola by midnight tomorrow (Tuesday) night. And we should be in port early Wednesday morning. This schedule works very well since we'll be coming into port in the daylight.

The sky, the seas, and the temperature all seem much more tropical now. The seas have lain down a little bit. The 14 ft. swells which we've been wrestling with the past 24 hours have calmed down a little bit. The low pressure system we've been monitoring for the past 5 days has been kind enough to wait awhile before forming into a tropical storm. The storm is expected to develop on Thursday and stay north of 25 degrees north and east of 55 degrees longitude. It should miss the BVIs completely. We've used up all our luck for the next year or so on that one!

Thanksgiving dinner this year is looking to be pizza and rum punch. A fitting end to our atypical passage. We missed the awards dinner for the rally by a couple of days. But, the rally is now planning a latecomers pizza party on Thursday for all us small, slow boats. There are about 20 of us still out here slowly making our way to Tortola. We contact each other twice per day to log our locations and get moral support. One boat has lost it's autopilot and is having to hand steer. They're north of us, and have about 300 miles to go. Pretty tough traveling!

So far so good for us. We lost our topping lift, but Captain Bill says we can live without it for now. With any luck we won't break anything else and will make it into port just fine.

Yours, patiently making our way to Tortola,

-the Pajarito crew, Captain Bill, Bob, and Deidre

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