It's 7am on Sunday. As of 1pm today we will have been going for one week. While the first 6 days were calm but a bit slow, as of yesterday we have been in the proper trade winds. Our speed has increased dramatically as a result. We averaged
7.1 knots through the day yesterday and 6.9 through the night (we reefed the sails a bit in the night). So far this morning we are doing 7.4.
The flipside of the speed is that the waves are choppier as well and fairly close together. We had a beautiful roast chicken and potato and carrot dinner last night but it wasn't really appreciated much as most people's stomach's were a little
rolly.
In days 1 through 4 we saw a lot of other boats. By part way through day 5 they were all gone and we were completely alone. No boats within sight and none showing up on our AIS (which "sees" as far as the top of our mast to the top of another
mast). We didn't see a single other boat yesterday. Last night we had three other ARC boats on AIS and one of them passed about 100 meters off our stern heading further north than us (we are sailing largely straight to St. Lucia, many other boats are doing
more angles to try to increase speed although at the cost of sailing further). This morning we can see three boats on AIS but they are different boats from the ones we saw last night.
We have a boat meeting at 6pm every night. We all rate how we are doing out of 10 both emotionally and physically. Then we play our song of the day and all sing along. Two nights ago I was a 9/9. Last night I was an 8/7. Right now I have probably
dropped to a 6 physically as I didn't sleep much at all through the night. Hopefully I can get a bit of rest today.
We have now sailed 914 miles. We have 1877 left to go. 1/3 of the way there! We have filmed three different music videos so far to share with other ARC boats (one from Hercules, one from Little Mermaid and one that we rewrote the lyrics to from
Annie). Currently the first song lyrics are running through my head "I don't care how far, I can go the distance."