Hi there everyone.
Well sunshine and flatish ( the spell checker wanted to respell flatish as flatfish, um spooky ) seas at last, time to catch up, clean the boat open a few "Not to be opened at sea" hatches, ahh fresh air below. I wont start with adding to our breakage list you would only, like me get depressed. I thought I would explain why we are sailing beautifully in 6.3 knots of true on the beam with a SOG of 5.2 knots. No I'm not talking about our well designed boat or my excellant light windsail trimming, I'm talking weather routing.
Thanks to our great friends back in Cowes Tom, Philippa & Stan we are hooked up with an excellant weather router. Simon Rowell of www.rowellyachtingservices.com +44(0)7971974015. It's an amazing asset for this sort of undertaking. The 2 of us can sail our boat in most conditions but then think about the weather 8 days ahead while it's too noisy to even sleep, no way. Basically I send Simon our position every morning at 6:00 utc with some basic weather observations (in my case very basic) by text on the Sat phone. Simon then sends an email with,a grib file of our area, a "psychotic" thingy covering the whole atlantic and a detailed weather forecast for the relevant areas. He also explains in plain english what I can expect to get hit by in the next 24 hours (no I don't mean another flying fish in the face). He also crucially advises on the route to take. On this one you have to trust the weather router as I do and agree a set a strategy, in my case ball park way points. If you are in any doubt you can use your phone and talk anything through with him anytime.
So to sum up, thanks to this great service we seem to have hit the wind hole with very little disruption to sailing, I'm amazed, well done Simon. Just a day of sailing slowly (perfecty trimmed of course) and the whoosh off we go again. Apparently the only mistake we made was to buy the wrong type of butter or at least calibrate the butter we have. Going south till the butter melts then turning right will only work with correctly calibrated butter.
Scott & Julia "Katerina"