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Scarlet Oyster - Into the low! Day 4 on Scarlet



Well the trials and tribulations continue! Outcomes have been quite
satisfactory tho!

Yesterday we realised our sat comms were down, out of credit?! How could
this be? I had topped up before we left Las Palmas and even had an e
reciept to prove it had gone through. The inmarsat voice service allows you
to check balance free of charge, and even top up if you have a voucher, but
frustratingly at the time no way of topping up otherwise!

I had given details to my girlfriend Sarah of our account, in case this
happened, so she could raise the alarm and authorise a top up, so I was
hoping we would be back online again soon, the concern was where 100 units
of credit had gone! We identified a ship on AIS and called them, they
kindly agreed to email Sarah with a message to let her know of our plight.
After 3 hrs still no joy, I was beginning to worry, as this does not look a
good year to guess your way across the weather systems! Checking again just
before 1pm, success! Calling our provider revealed an internal error had
not added our balance, Sarah had not received the email, but had checked the
boat email and seen we had not picked up emails for 6hrs, so thought she
would see what was going on, problem solved, and an apologetic service
provider has promised he will check our balance daily till we reach St
Lucia, which is pretty good of him.

Anyways the sailing has been interesting, with the wind averaging much as
indicated by the gribs, however this average has been met by much more wind
at times and much less at others! Frustrating! We have had some great
close to limit kite sailing, making great progress when conditions suit.
Chatlie who is weather routing and I have been seeing eye to eye on
everything so far and we are very satisfied with our route so far. The
northern option frankly looked bl**dy hard work, the idea I thought was to
go south to the sunshine not back up to latitudes we left some weeks ago!
Even if it does pay up there it will be chilly and bumpy I expect! The
extreme S option looked a bit of a long way round too, so we have opted for
a more direct route, which on the face of it puts us straight into the low
pressure, but this is not a deep low so should be comfortable enough.
Infact we have gone to lengths to pick the windiest part to aim for, as this
still is only 10knots on the grib, there is a lot of light wind to
negotiate, bt we hope our positioning will give us some power and reasonable
angles to help us through. Fingers crossed! Right now we have 15-18knots
on the nose, bumpy but at least we are moving west still.

After not being able to check our position overnight, I guess due to the
automatic email reply system going down we were delighted to find that for
now at least we still lead our class and overall IRC! More impressive is
that we appear to be 3rd equal on the water in the entire racing fleet,
behind just Caro and Monster Project! This is ofcourse based solely on
distance to finish, but pleasing none the less! Seeing maxis, TP52s etc
behind on the tracker is quite a buzz!

Once we have the wind veer through W we will tack and continue our mission
SW to the Sun, it is nice and sunny for now at least!

Excuse any typos etc, I have the sun reflecting off the nav screen and am
typing almost blind!

Back to the driving now, all well onboard!

Ross

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