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Live from Onboard

Weather and other silly things...

The weather has been rather weird compared to all the other transatlantics Boogie and I have done so far. And there are a few: Boogie is on his 20th Transatlantic, I on my 9th...
It already started at the beginning: a normal transat will see you in shorts and tees in the evening after 3, max 4 days (ok, I might take a bit longer but I get could and even wear thin thermals at night in the Caribbean, so that doesn’t count really!). After a week we were still wearing jackets!
 
Also, we’ve had very little of the usual Cumulus clouds on the horizon (the nice puffy white ones) with a brilliant blue clear sky and a big shiny sun...but lots of overcast, although admittedly, very little rain (and yes, I had a good deal of it as usual, but not all of it this time!).  So not a very sunny crossing this time either...the only time Boogs and I were whiter upon arrival in the Caribbean was when we took the plane last year!
 
No sign of the usual middle-of-the-night-you-have-to-get-up-now-to-put-a-reef-in squalls at night either...
And the most frustrating is, that after having had a not unusual couple of days of light wind just before halfway, it looks like we will be having very light winds until the 17th of December. Guess I won’t be collecting the winnings of our sweepstakes, having bet on the 15th at 1930. Theoretically still a possibility, if only we could do an average of 16+ knots for the next 30 hours!
With winds forecast to be between 2 and 9 knots until Monday, we’ll be getting there a bit later than expected.
 
The forecast suddenly changed about a week ago, from having a nice solid 15-20 knots that would see us doing some champagne sailing on the last days of the trip to get to the islands, to several days of virtually nothing...not a good prospect on a boat that weighs over 50T...especially as we’d already had 2-3 days of motor sailing and definitely didn’t have enough fuel to cover the distance to St Lucia if we would have to motor all the way in...
So when we had to start motoring yesterday afternoon, we went for slowly but surely, keeping the RPMs and our speed low, trying to make the diesel last just that little bit longer...
So far the strategy seems to be working and we've got just under 500nm to go...but we’re still hoping for some more wind!
 
To keep ourselves occupied, there’s been baking (bread, brownies, bananarumcake), fishing (lots of mahi mahi and a massive tuna! the sashimi doesn’t come much fresher than this!), cooking (said tuna and mahi mahi amongst others) and some creative stuff: Hans fiddling with his photos, and a crew effort that has produced, apart from hilarious laughter and much craziness, the start of a sailing detective, situated on, where else could it possibly be, a super yacht in St Barths – we can’t reveal the details of course but it’s juicy and has lots of money, sex, deceit and murder in it....how can it not become a best seller!
We will keep you posted!
 
Friday 14 December – 1401 boat time (UTC –3)
492nm to go
SOG 5.0 kn – wind 6 knots from behind
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Star Chaser Sailing Ltd - Trading as Sail Blue Planet and
Blue Planet Sailing Adventures

Phone: +44 7795 566 277
info@sailblueplanet.com