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White Satin - It's a long way to St Lucia



Saturday 26 November.
845 miles sailed and 2012 to go.

It's a long way to St Lucia, it's a long way to go
It's a long way to St Lucia, to the sweetest place I know
Goodbye Gran Canaria, farewell Las Palmas
It's a long long way to St Lucia, but rum punch lies there.

It is seeming a long way but we are now definitely well past quarter of the
way and should hit one third by the end of Sunday.

Whilst we have had some beautiful sailing over the last few days we have
also had periods of very little wind so our average speed is lower than
hoped.

Yesterday we had a long radio conversation with JoEmi, a German yacht, about
the best way to avoid the "wind hole" that is somewhere in front of us.
Skipper has spent hours downloading and pouring over weather forecasts. Our
main source of information are GRIB files from Mailasail and the official
ARC weather forecast which is sent once a day. GRIB files are a very simple,
low data rate way of sending weather information which is presented as a
simple map, covered in little arrows, showing wind direction and speed over
a certain time frame.

Much as two yachts heading the same way constitute a race, two weather
forecasts constitute a contradiction!!

Anyway we are where we are and we have decided on a policy of heading south
and west, to maintain boat speed, and get down to the trade winds as soon as
we can. We expect another two or three days of light winds before we get
down to 15N and hopefully favourable winds.

We did manage a good bit of "proper" downwind sailing a couple of days ago.
We had the genoa poled out to starboard and the mainsail to port. Jeff
Taylor (our Moody agent and valued advisor) gave us a very useful tip. White
Satin has two sails at the front, the big genoa and a small self tacking
jib. Jeff suggested deploying the small jib, sheeted in quite hard as well
as the two big sails. This adds a little to boat speed but, more important,
reduces rolling. Having tried this we can confirm it certainly reduces
rolling very well and hopefully made us faster as well, thanks Jeff.

More important than all this techno-babble, Vicki has not suffered from any
"mal de mere" !! Although winds have been gentle we are still in the middle
of the Atlantic so the boat is always moving around and at times very
lively. Vicki is now totally off the Stugeron. Although it works well on the
sickness front it does make her a bit drugged up and quiet. The rest of the
crew may put her back on her pills soon for a bit of peace though.

We continue to eat well although the fresh stuff is being used up. We have
nets all over with fruit and veg, we were amused by the bananas relaxing in
their hammock in the saloon (see photo). Note these are "not to be used for
navigation".

We would welcome the odd email from home. Due to the satellite comms route these need to be brief, in simple text and no attachments through. These need to go to [email protected]


Patient times

David


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