Sailor Ted decided today that now his fur coat has acclimatised to the sun he was going to get his top off and put on his speedos. I found him first sunning himself on the aft deck, then chilling in the cockpit. As it was such a lovely day he said to me “Can I please have a steer” and I said “Why of course you can Sailor Ted” and he spent some hours (still in his speedos) driving the good ship. What a good job he did and we made great progress today straight down the rhumb line, good old Sailor Ted.
The green fushing lures replacement, the orange and red squiddy fishy thingy went for a swim today, also failed to catch a fish. I reckon it’s back to trusty pink and blue squids, they never fail.
After cracking the 1000 miles to go in the early hours of today we now have an 8 at the beginning, we’ve got 850ish to run to St Lucia. Not sure how this is going to work out fully as the weather models conflict but we expect the breeze to go forward and lighten up over night. Some show it as low as 5 knots, others are more optimistic, we will keep our fingers and toes crossed. It’s getting a little tricky out there, quite a lot of rain activity around and after it hits you are left in basically zero breeze and what there is going in circles. We’ve been lucky to only get hit by one of these whilst I was cooking dinner but involves lots of activity dropping spinnaker, getting out Genoa, sails flapping and eventually ghosting our way out to new breeze and then once settled getting the spinnaker back up. We’ve decided for the night, despite it really being big spinnaker territory, to put up the code 5 as that furls so way easier to deal with if we get hit again. Could be a long night and quite slow. Today was probably an average 8-8.5 knots boat speed, now more like 5-6 knots.
Slightly disappointing news from rally control that St Lucia have decided we need a COVID test when we arrive and must quarantine for 48hrs or so awaiting results. We all had a negative one in Las Palmas and will have spent 14 days at sea. The original position of St Lucia was that would suffice but they have decided to extend some different conditions longer. Nevertheless a well thought out set of protocols have been sent through and a kind message from the tourism minister, we are more than happy to oblige, fully understand why. So it looks like 48hrs on anchor rather than the quarantine dock after we have our tests is this crews preference, get some swimming in.
The big news of the day is that we saw a whale, a very very big whale probably similar size to Rush and only about 3 boat lengths ahead. I was helming and altered course a bit but it dived anyway, quite the sight so close. It’s always very cool and extremely humbling to see such a magnificent creature in it’s habitat. Hope we see another one, maybe not quite so close!
All here are keeping fingers crossed we avoid these rain clouds overnight. There is no real wind in them but an absolute pain after they’ve passed trying to get going again.
Good night :-)
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