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Firefly - On passage to Lanzarote



We made great progress last night under white sails with the 13 knot wind coming from the North West - we were rigged up and sailing within minutes of leaving Cascais yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately (Friday morning) it went North and dropped to about 8 knots and even with the Parasailor up our progress was slipping so around noon time we put the engine on for a while to charge the batteries and get back on track. 45 minutes later the wind picked back up with a little more West in it so we now have the Gennaker up and with Peter at the wheel I just saw 8.1 knots on the chartplotter although its surprisingly shiftly - just like Salcombe Harbour.

Since passing Spain we have generally seen a Southerly current which has been very nice. However since passing South of Cabo St Vincent we have had some counter current - the further South we go we expect it to flick back to running towards the South East and the closer we get to Lanzarote we should be dragged along more and more by the Canarian Current - that and the NE trades will ultimately help us all the way to the West Indies.

This passage is 625 miles and after 24 hours we have managed 144 an average of 6 knots. This is a lot better than we anticipated looking at the forecasts before we left. We do need to get a move on as Firefly has a date with the travel hoist at Puerto Calero Marina at 0900 on Wednesday. She is being hoisted to enable us to antifoul and polish. And it needs to be good as we want it to last until Fiji in June 2014.

The suns out, although we do have a few clouds and its about 25 Centigrade.

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