First night at sea
Associate3
Chris & Katie Russell
Mon 20 Nov 2017 15:50
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26:56.25N 16:32.04W
We successfully carried a growing ENE wind down the
coast of Gran Canaria into the night. With no moon it was a particularly dark
but there was a good view of the stars and the planets (we were steering
via Saturn at one point). Unfortunately we fell into a bit of a frustrating
wind hole at midnight but eventually extracted ourselves and carried on with our
NE trades. This was not helped by our loss of our wind speed and direction
instrumentation that has steadfastly refused to work.......
The dark night made dodging other boats quite
interesting - especially as some still don't seem to know the correct lights to
put on - a surprise in this fleet. This morning the boats are much
more spread out and this will continue to happen so will not be such an issue in
the future. Its a big ocean.
There are two clear options for our route. The western
route that would take us towards the unhelpful low that will pass to the north
of the Canaries over the next couple of days and the southern route which means
going down to the Cape Verdes (about 600 miles) and tuning right - the
later is longer and may mean a long motor but the former, whist considerably
faster, means beating into heavy winds - possibly gale force - with rain.
We are going south! This means that we will not get back into our trade winds
until Friday night and begin the sleigh ride towards St Lucia.
All is good on board as we settle into our routines of 2
hours on and 4 hours off. We overlap in two teams so that each person has
an hour with another during their watch. So far we have had a glorious sail
today that now sees us reaching in bright and warm sunshine towards the Verdes -
T-shirt weather
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