Wednesday November 16th to Thursday November 17th, 2011
At sea
Another great day of sailing, even though nothing much has happened. Sailing close-hauled, we had a deep reef in the main yesterday afternoon and overnight, but took it out this morning. Our present wind speed is about 10-12 knots, enough to keep Lady moving at about 7 knots Steve reported that Lady had a nice wash from a squall overnight - Charlie and I slept through it.
Although we have no Internet at sea, we can send and receive emails, through the SSB, using our Sailmail account. We receive emails from rally control giving us weather and other information, we also have current subscriptions to a couple of saildocs, which send us the NOAA text forecast for the area and also a grib file showing wind direction in a pictorial format. Bob Crawford has been paying close attention to weather and our position, and emails us frequently about what he sees.
We even get an occasional email from a family member and one of the other boats in the rally sent us an email. We try to connect twice a day to see if anybody still knows that we exist. We are anxious for the wind to turn more to the north-east. If it continues in the present south-easterly direction that we have had since we got through the high pressure system, we'll make landfall in Puerto Rico. Charlie calculates that we do have enough fuel left that if the wind dies completely, we should still be able to motor to Tortola.
Our noon position today was 24 52N 067 60W. We made about 165 nautical miles since noon yesterday, and have 430 nautical miles to the finish.
The ocean is a gorgeous shade of ultramarine blue, and the sound of Lady breaking through the waves is a delightful never-ending song.
Jenny