Good Evening Everyone :-)
It’s been a slow 24hrs with much lighter breeze than forecast so we are gently making our way South and a little West as best we can. We made only 125 miles or so towards St Lucia from noon yesterday until noon today which is by far our lowest 24hr run. All good though, we’re actually really enjoying the flat seas and gentle sailing under full mainsail and big yellow spinnaker. Mostly we are seeing around 7-10 knots of wind and able to sail 5 to 6 knots in almost the right direction, we should be seeing 12 knots or so of wind but we’re not so we play the game with what we have. It’ll be another pretty slow 24hrs but it’s been fun here on the good ship and there’s no rush to be at the other end.
Busy day today. Took on the toilet fix but that didn’t last long as some bolts in the casing of the pump were sheared. We don’t have a new casing so we’ve come up with a way round our problem and it should get us there. Also had a full strip down of one of the fishing reels as it had stopped clicking when you get a fish following a service in Las Palmas. Turns out it had been pumped full of a bit too much grease and the clicky thingy was stuck, nice one Alan for the patience to strip down such a complex fiddly thing.
Took the opportunity as it’s nice and calm to empty the aft locker and check all the steering gear and auto pilot which all seemed in order. We also dropped the spinnaker to check halyard for chafe and re-hoisted, that was fine. We’ve dyneema tipped that halyard as we might have said before and that’s for sure made a big difference in the chafe department.
After yesterdays attack from the monster of the deep we resumed fishing today but no results. Have switched tactics to a green squid lure after our green plug lure was ripped off so enthusiastically. Nothing today but we’ll persevere with the same lure tomorrow. If it doesn’t work we will have a rethink for the day after.
We have a big North Atlantic chart and Nia got it up to date with all our noon positions today with little notes on what was happening at each point, destination kitchen wall one day.
Full moon tonight or very close to it. As I write sitting out here in virtually daylight in a gentle breeze lolloping our way slowly along, it’s really very special to be out here.
Sleep well.
Rush Out
image2image1