Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 6)

Day 6 was a slow day from the start. At dawn the wind dropped to just 10knots. The lack of pressure on the sails made BV roll a bit more as the waves passed and every now and then the sails whipped around making the whole rig shudder. Our speed, of course, also dropped off and so we were only making around 5 knots of progress. It only takes a couple more knots of wind for BV to set off, so let’s hope that we can get through this light wind patch soon. The forecast suggests that in a few days’ time we’ll be romping along with 20-25knots of wind and that it will remain so for the rest of the passage. That should have a beneficial effect on our daily averages although I wonder if we’ll be complaining that there is too much wind.

It’s still mostly overcast but definitely brighter. Last night we had a period of no cloud and so we think that in a day or 2 we’ll be enjoying blue skies during the day and starlit nights. Much more the bluewater cruising that we had expected although, to be fair, standard daytime rig is now swimming costumes to keep cool.

The breaks in the cloud were just good enough to take some sun sights, which I did, although the results were not brilliant until Nicky spotted a mistake in my calculations. As a result, my initial 30nm out for my calculated midday position turned into a much more acceptable 11 miles out from where we actually were.

We gybed again just after breakfast putting us on starboard tack to maintain the plan of keeping south of 16N. That seems to help a bit in avoiding the really light forecast winds. At dusk we gybed back onto port to fit in with the forecast which shows the wind coming more from the ENE over the next few days.

We used the last of our fresh bread from Mindelo today and so we’ve now started to bake our own. Today’s loaf, the first one, was quite small in order to confirm the recipe but it looks good. Hopefully we’ll be up to full boulangerie standard by the time we get to the Caribbean.   

The final 2 bits of news for today are that at just before 0400 local (0600UTC) we completed our 6000^th mile at sea this season and at just after 1200 local 91400UTC) at N16 00 W37 30 we passed into the next time zone. So, we put our clocks back one hour and are now in P time zone, 3 hours behind UTC.









Position at 0001 Sat 30 Dec: N15 44 W038 33
Distance run 1159-1159: 143nm
Distance run 2359-2359: 133nm (25 hours because of the change in time zone)
Distance run so far: 815nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 1232nm

End of Day 6 position