Friday, January 12, 2018

Day 5 - South Atlantic Ocean crossing

Hi all.... Dave again with a quick update on day 5 of our passage.

We are at 24 deg 43' South and 08 deg 11' East. We are on a COG (course over ground) of 310 degrees and doing roughly 6 to 7 knots in 12 to 15 knots of SSE winds. Completely cloudy and overcast skies for yesterday and today. Seas are a comfortable 1 to 1.5 meters. We now have 941 miles remaining to St. Helena.

Time is passing slowly out here with not much to see except the occasional ship which are now becoming less frequent.... Meaning we must be getting away from the main shipping routes. With the overcast conditions and no moon the nights are PITCH black.... So bad if you turn off the navigation lights you literally can't see the front of the boat. Never a nice feeling not being able to see at least the horizon or some stars :)

Gaby has almost completely gotten over her cold thank goodness and Guds and I are still healthy.... Yay! Gaby and Guds made some cup cakes today to celebrate us having less than 1,000 miles to go... Very yummy!

This morning we took down the main sail and jib and put up the spinnaker as the wind is moderate and directly behind us. What should have been a short 15 minute sail change turned into a 2 hour ordeal as the spinnaker was so twisted inside its sock I could barely hoist it. We decided to take it back down to fix the twist and could not pull the dousing sock down over it. So started the ordeal.... We ended up taking the spinnaker down the old fashioned racing way with no sock. Got it all down and laid it all over the foredeck and sides and began untwisting it. With that eventually done we stuffed it all back in the spinnaker sock and had a successful re-hoist!!! I am glad we did it in moderate conditions as I would not like to have done that in 20 plus knots of wind. It ended up taking all 4 of us to untangle and re-hoist..... It's at times like this that I realize how much the kids have learned and what an integral team we have become :)

By this time it was lunch time as we had not even had breakfast. The rest of the day has been a little easier... A quick vacuum and cleaning inside the boat and then catching up on emails.

I am so glad we put our at sea satellite email address in the last blog update as we were so happy to receive so many emails from so many old friends. A big thanks for dropping us a line.... So cool to get news and updates in such isolation out here.

With that I will sign off and go and get some rest before night shift tonight. All the very best to you all and wishing you a wonderful weekend.

Cheers from Dave, Guds, Ben and Gaby

Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.

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