Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 5)

So, it’s Day 5 and the sky remains resolutely overcast. We’ve seen lots of flying fish (though only 3 on the deck this morning – hooray, fewer scales to clean up) but this ‘bluewater’ sailing lark is currently very grey. However, it’s getting increasingly warm so we must be going in the right direction!

We had a working breakfast (after Reg had cleared up the flying fish) and gybed BV back onto starboard tack as well as dropping a reef into both the main and genoa. The reefs didn’t last long as the wind dropped and we’ve been under full sail for most of the day. We had planned to remain south of 16N to try to avoid too much in the day of light winds tomorrow but today’s wind and swell haven’t really played ball for that. Maybe we’ll gybe back onto port tack tomorrow morning.

Jitano remains out of VHF radio range but, great excitement, we did see a ship on AIS today! It didn’t get closer than about 15nm so we didn’t actually see it for real (the vis is still very poor so it would have got a bit close for comfort for us to have seen it) but at least it proves that our AIS is still working.

The only other news is that whilst Reg spent most of the afternoon catching up with some of the blog entries, I spent an hour trying to clean African red dust off the mast and rigging (that which I could reach from deck level). I had done a clean-up around the cockpit and aft deck area a couple of days ago and now we can look forward (if not forward and up) and not see a full coating of red-brown dust on everything. It also means that we don’t end up filthy when we go forward to carry out sail manoeuvres. What exciting news, eh? It’s all happening here!

Position at 0001 Fri 29 Dec: N15 59 W036 22
Distance run 1159-1159: 159nm
Distance run 2359-2359: 155nm
Distance run so far: 681nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 1358nm

End of Day 5 position