N25.49.0 W19.57.0
Amazing Grace
John and Julie
Tue 24 Nov 2009 04:48
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Its the middle of the night and we are still
cruising along nicely. A little more slowly than before as the wind has
dropped but that's good since we are all able to sleep better.
The sky is clear and its just amazing how many
stars you can see when there are no street lights to get in the
way!
We still see the odd boat on the horizon but they
never seem to get any closer. That's probably because we are all heading
in the same direction (approximately) and the differences in boat speed are not
that great. The bigger, faster boats seemed to leave us yesterday. One
went away southwards so maybe we will cross paths again. It was an Oyster
72 and they spoke to us on the radio in between the caviar and roast quail
courses (theirs not ours!).
This trip is about 2600 miles if you could go in a
straight line. The problem is that the trade winds are not properly set
yet and so generally, we have to go a little south of the direct course to get
the best of them. The traditional wisdom is to "go south till the butter
melts and then turn right" however, in the days of the refrigerator this
does not work. Happily we now have GPS and you can enter the point where
most peoples butter melts into it and go there instead! Anyway, what that
means is that we have done about 300 miles in the 33 hours we have been on the
go and the direct (great circle) route to St Lucia leaves us 2400 miles to
go. We will continue heading south west ish today to keep in the decent
winds. There is talk of a depression to the north next week that will
affect the pattern of winds somewhat and we want to be away from that influence
as much as possible.
As I write,Dan is at the helm watching how Ray, the
auto pilot, does his stuff. Ray is a bit of a whiner but well worth putting up
with since it means we have much less work to do! We were passed by that
Oyster 72 yesterday - they cost well over £1m - and they were hand steering -
you can tell times were hard for them!
On Sunday night we feasted on smoked salmon salad.
Alan from Ca Canny brought it all the way from the USA for us as a present
- he also bought us dinner on Saturday night! What a nice man! You can get
smoked salmon by Spence and Company from Publix so you can see what we were
eating too! We had a great dinner last night of chicken in montreal
dressing (Randy's favorite) with salad. Note that everything at the moment
is with salad since we have to eat the fresh veggies before they rot! We
have laid in 45 oranges and about 45 apples, bananas and kiwi fruit so there's
little chance of the crew getting scurvy.
We made water yesterday so that was a relief and we
will pump it into the main tank later. We all had showers so the
'ambiance' is nice and fresh although Dan has a pretty fancy
smelling box of baby wipes. I guess he must have got them in Beverly Hills
or somewhere.
I think I have possibly rambled enough for now so I
will bid you all farewell. It will soon be time for a bit of fishing so check in
again soon for the fishing report!
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