End of Day 2 - Great Guana Cay Bahamas to Charleston USA

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSBradio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359 (AST, GMT-4) 24 Apr 2019

Dear All,

Our gentle sail of yesterday finally ended at 2100hrs when the wind dropped off completely.  Since then, despite a couple of attempts to sail, it has mostly been lots and lots of motoring.  The miles are ticking down, so we are making progress, but it would be much nicer to be sailing.

No wind and lots of motoring!

The lack of wind in this area is not much of a surprise for us, although we had anticipated that we would have sailed for a little longer before having to motor.  There's a large area of high pressure that we have to cross and then tomorrow the system changes and we should start to get more wind.  But if we hadn't set off when we did, we would have ended up beating into strong northerlies at this stage of the passage and would have been late for meeting up with Ollie and Sheena.

On the plus side, this easy motoring along is allowing much work to be done on writing blog entries.  We are miles behind but if we keep going as we are we should have a lot of entries ready to post when we get to Charleston. We might even get as far as the beginning of March and the end of our time in Cuba!

The major excitement of the afternoon was at 1300hrs when we caught a 3ft long dorado, or dolphin fish. Dorados have beautiful green colouring and the meat tastes really good. So Nicky, who is on the chef watch duties today, cooked up fish and chips for dinner (with home-made tartar sauce and chips made from yams).  Delicious.

Just before sunset we were passed by a pod of pilot whales

We have made some calculations and put in an offset to our track to take into account the effect of the Gulf Stream which is about 60 miles wide and is sitting about 150 miles off the American coast. The light wind had swung around to the southwest by late this afternoon and when it builds and we start sailing again we don't want to be swept past Charleston by the stream (depending on which chart you read the Gulf Stream parallels the coast running at either about 1.5kts or as much as 2-4kts), hence the offset now.

As I sign this off, the wind has built to 9 knots from the SW and so we should be able to start sailing again soon - hurrah!

Love

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:
Position at midday 24 April: N28 50 W78 07
Position at 2359 24 April: N29 51 W78 44
Midday to midday distance: 145 nautical miles
Midnight to Midnight distance: 154 nautical miles
Total miles covered:  234 nautical miles
Approximate distance to go: 185 nautical miles

End of Day 2 - Great Guana Cay Bahamas to Charleston USA