Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 3) Boxing Day

Boxing Day was a good sailing day as stats show below. The wind has increased to 18-22 knots and the swell to 2.5 metres so, with BV sailing along at 7-8 knots, we’ve left the sail plan as it is – triple reefed main and full genoa. And today we hit our trip max speed over the ground – 12.7 knots recorded by the GPS as we surfed down a wave. Goodness knows when it happened mind you; that’s one of the downsides of having Georgina (the windvane self-steering system) steering all the time!

Just 2 flying fish landed on the deck overnight so we are feeling less guilty about scaring them into an early demise and, at the same time, delighted that we don’t have a deck covered in fish scales once more. They’re a bit fiddly eating and, anyway, we have loads of food on board, and so we just threw them back into the sea to be recycled by the rest of the wildlife.

As on Christmas Day, our celebrations today started with a late morning coffee, with a slice of Panettone and a small glass of Madeira. In the traditional theme, our Boxing Day dinner was ham but carved off the whole leg of Serrano ham we had bought in Las Palmas. Fantastic, even if the carving is a little trickier in a rolling yacht. Reg also rustled up a tomato salad and coleslaw whilst I was asleep off-watch this afternoon and we ate the ham and salads with boiled new potatoes and some pan-fried leeks – delicious! The ‘tree’ is surviving, though the pieces of sellotape holding the lights up are gradually failing. So as the holiday season progresses, instead of having a tree surrounded by a carpet of pine needles we may find that we have a tree surrounded by a carpet of fairly lights.

Our last sighting of Jitano a few miles out of Mindelo as she wished us good luck for our passage    

During the day the cloud has thinned but the visibility has remained poor. One of the yachts that left at the same time as us appeared briefly about 1.5 miles away. It didn’t help that their AIS is set up so poorly that it has a range of just 1.5 nm too! We got the ‘ship in close proximity’ alarm sounding but a lot closer than we would have wanted if we had needed to take any avoiding action. One of the other yachts that left at the same time as us is a French yacht called Jitano. They called us up on the radio at the beginning of the trip to wish us a good passage and since then I’ve been sending and requesting position reports with the daily using the VHF radio DSC. They responded for the first time today and, despite our small sail plan and much to our surprise, we are now 10.5 miles ahead of them. As we are effectively sailing in company, we’ll continue to exchange position reports daily because they are likely to be the closest yacht should either of us need any help.

Position at 0001 Wed 27 Dec: N16 41 W031 22
Distance run 1159-1159: 151nm
Distance run 2359-2359: 159nm
Distance run so far: 373nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 1648nm

End of Day 3 position