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Hada - HADA Day 16 — Swimmin' & Rockin' (Westwards!)



HADA Day 16 — Tuesday December 10th, 2013 19h29 UTC-3
Post #10

Greetings to all from everyone aboard HADA, reporting from Mid Atlantic, 13 degrees 40 minutes North, 47 degrees, 41 minutes West.

We are finally rocking westward with good and steady winds propelling us toward our next destination, with only 772 miles to go to St. Lucia. On the basis of miles, this means we are about 75% of the way there given that we will have travelled close to 3000 miles since departing Las Palmas. The crew is healthy and starting to look forward to set foot on land in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

Today we’ve had our highest “mile” day yet, running close to 9 knots on average and ticking off 200+ miles over the past 24 hours alone. This feels great to everyone aboard after the slow days.

Our pace this past Sunday was in fact so leisurely that we took to swimming in the middle of the Atlantic, off the back of the boat - while hanging on to ropes.

Yesterday the excitement was a “failed” generator - shutting down unexpectedly and threatening us with a potential loss of battery power, which runs pretty much everything aboard. Of course we had the main engine’s alternator as a backup to keep us going, but that required us to sharply cut power consumption temporarily. We figured out in short order that the problem was fuel delivery to the generator which, after several hours of investigation, turned out to be a simple issue. Always nice to have a bunch of engineers on board! As of today, we were able to resume the use of our generator, enabling us to once again run our on board refrigeration so that we can keep crew amply supplied with chilled means of “hydration” :-).

As for our ranking in the race, it looks like we are “solidly” established in the back of the pack, with not much hope for further advancement in the remaining time, as our fellow sailors appear to also be enjoying a pickup in wind speeds. While our bet of taking a longer route with the hope of avoiding low wind conditions gave us a comfortable and (mostly) sunny ride, it looks like it won’t have gotten us a sufficient increase in speed to more than win us back the time it took to cover the ~250-300 additional miles.

We have been on a starboard gybe these past 2 days, with HADA heeling at a steady 25-30 degrees day ad night,, which we expect to continue in the coming days as well.

Landfall in St. Lucia this weekend is being much anticipated, and I expect it will have us likely walking at an angle for a while until we straighten up again (haha).

Cheers,
André & the gang on S/V Hada.


HADA Cruisin
Ed Dive
TJ Dive

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