Persistent Lady - May 16,2014 Mid-Atlantic

May 16, 2014 Mid-Atlantic ... Still dancing with the storm.
We are making good progress eluding the storm. If you think of the storm as a clock we started at about the 9:00 o,clock position and the storm was moving toward the 8-9 position. That was yesterday. Today we are about 7:30 and have moved out into the outer bands of it where the winds are pretty light (comparatively). At noon today we downloaded a grib file of the area with a three day forecast and analyzed it for options. It looked like, if the prediction was right, and if our speed held, and if the wind direction matched the forecast, that on the third day the storm would turn back North and, if that happened on the third day, we would benefit from tacking into the storm midday today. If all those assumptions held, we would end up in light, but favorable winds on day three. However, there are at least three if's in that calculation, and I usually stop at two. So we are continuing on our SouthEast course, while the storm continues on it's Southwest course and are generally in pretty nice conditions, but are hard on the wind. We will probably download another grib tonight about eight o'clock or tomorrow morning and if that looks consistent, we will most likely tack toward the storm (Northeast)and hope to ride the westerly winds along the bottom of the LOW and get a sling-shot up toward the Azores from the winds as they veer to the Southwest as the LOW passes above and away from us.

This morning at about 5:00 AM we saw at least a dozen ARC boats clustered together on the far edge of the horizon, which would put them about twelve miles from us. We are going SouthEast and they appeared to be heading South by SouthEast. They were already South of us and heading further South, We feel OK about being a little North, and in the end that will be just so much Southing that we don't have to make up.

Sherrin is making chicken fajitas and pinto beans for dinner tonight, we had meatball heroes on her homemade French bread night before last and had the leftover meatballs over spaghetti last night and polished off the last of that for lunch today. She is really keeping us well fed! For breakfast we have a choice of hard boiled eggs, homemade granola (everyone's favorite)with milk, fresh fruit, yogurt and leftover oatmeal raisin cookies. Everything we eat is cooked at sea; we intended to cook up some meals and freeze them for use in rough weather, but ran out of time, so everything is prepared daily; the pulled pork sandwiches were a highlight, no one could stop eating them, she makes her barbecue sauce by starting out with about five different kinds of dried chilies, which she roasts - in two minutes you can't breathe and are coughing and chocking, but the flavor she gets from them is unbelievable!!! Unfortunately, we dropped the container with the sauce and broke it on day two, so we were limited on the sauce; but the good news is that she has another pork shoulder in the freezer, so we are all looking forward to another round of pulled pork sandwiches soon.

Will have an update later tonight or tomorrow.