We are of course consumed with the news of our friends on Outer Limits today, and miss having them out here and hope their spirits are OK. Joost and crew, if you are reading this, hang in there and I hope you are planning the next voyage. There is so much randomness in life, and we are glad you'll all get to go many more rounds!
We looked at our email from Joost last night, and it looks to be about one hour before their boat was struck by the whale. How sad and unfortunate. We heard Halo call them on the VHF. Outer Limits was about 50 miles Southeast of us, and Halo must have been somewhere in between. We could hear Halo call, but couldn't hear Outer Limits, and we had no idea anything was happening.
Onboard Wild Goose - Saturday May 19, 2012
Another great day of sailing, with 15-20 knot winds from the South while we are going Northeast. That makes it a broad reach. It's as good as it gets and has been so far on this leg, now into it's fourth day, but we don't take it for granted.
We want to keep the good conditions and have been downloading weather gribs. Also, Henry Yung sent me an email this morning saying "Weather shows the same S or SE at 15-20 for the next 48 hours. You are making great progress. There is a developing low and front above you. To stay out of the strong winds you should stay below 38N. Then you should be fine." The gribs also show that there is some stormy weather North of us that we are trying to avoid, but also some dead air (a high pressure front) ahead of us to the south our current track. We'll try to thread the needle and see if it works, but we have fuel and we can reef the sails depending on what we encounter.
There are lots of weather opinions on the SSB net each morning and night. There are 30 boats checking in and everyone seems to have their own opinion of what to do for the best passage, and I guess we are all really looking at the same data. We listen to them all. There is one German skipper who we are calling the "Willard Scott" of Germany who has a strong view and keeps saying "stay South young man" to another Italian skipper who thinks it is best to head North. One of them is probably right. We are just taking the great wind that has presented itself for the past few days and are thinking we will get another grib file and make our plans from that to try to maintain it.
We had Bacon and Egg wraps for breakfast and they hit the spot. Last night we had a great spaghetti with sausages and garlic bread. We are probably the best fed boat in ARC-Europe. Lisa is the Julia Childs of ARC-Europe and we are happy to have her on Wild Goose. Julia, like Lisa, was a Massachusetts lady. Fine chefs both.
So long for now. I have encouraged other writers on WIld Goose to contribute, but they are too busy reading books and navigating to do it, but I am still hopeful.