Day 16th and what I believe will be our last night at see for this voyage.

 

The time now is 18:45 UTC and we are at position 14.25.81 N 58.37.54 W - with an estimated 135 nm to Rodney Bay, St. Lucia. We are currently on a heading of 270 sailing at about 7 knot is some of the biggest swells we have seen for days. At least there are no squalls today. We have the wind almost dead astern at 16-20 knots and are running under mainsail only and making pretty good progress.

 

Our expectation (assuming the wind and weather hold) is to arrive at St Lucia tomorrow, December 12th at 15:00 UTC or 11:00 local time.

 

We are very excited and waiting in great anticipation for tomorrows arrival. If we arrive as estimated we will have completed the ARC in 16 days and 2 hours!

 

Today we have been busy getting the boat ready for arrival. The boys have spent time reading. One last ditch effort fishing with a modified lure - we'll see in a few hours if we get anything.

 

We had one last visit from another pod of very playful dolphins today. They were much smaller than the dolphins we have seen the other day. But what they lacked in size they gave back tenfold in entertainment factor. They were leaping out of the water, surfing the waves, jumping over each other and diving in front of California Blue for over an hour. They were great fun! A couple of cool pics attached    

 

Our wonderful Onan generator which has missed a beat since we started had a bit of hiccup this afternoon and keeps cutting out on us giving all sorts of error codes. So the engine is on to charge the batteries. I have the helm and Jayson is trying to troubleshoot with the manual. Hmm. Glad we are going to be in port tomorrow :)

 

Vic is working on dinner - stir fried chicken and veg.

 

I just need to complete our arrival documents otherwise we should be good to go.

 

We have been discussing what to wear when we cross the finish line tomorrow and still don't have consensus. Mostly because we don't have matching shirts. So we will just keeping you guessing until tomorrow and our photo opportunity across the finish line.

 

That's all for now.

 

All the excitement about our arrival in tomorrows blog with tons of exciting new pictures.

 

Take care,

 

Mark and the crew of California Blue