Ascension Northwards - Day Two 06 56.699S 017 57.930W

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Tue 15 Apr 2014 17:28
24 hours of light winds, quite a bit lighter than we expected. It's been much like the passage from St Helena to Ascension - a lovely sunny day with a boat speed around 4kts. Sometimes it's a little more and we get all excited when it gets up as far as 5kts! Not so nice is that there is a colliding wave pattern, with wave trains coming from the SSE and from the East. When we're on one or the other it's fine, but when they meet we rock and roll. The waves are only tiny (less than a metre), but they are enough to set the boat into an uncomfortable roll. The forecast is for slightly stronger winds and they would definitely help if they do eventually arrive. It's interesting that the boats that missed Ascension and are going straight from St Helena to FdN, and so to the west of us, are all getting good SSE winds, while we're getting light Easterlies. We're only about 150 miles away so hope we'll pick up their wind at some point, but there is no sign of it in the forecast. In fact there's no sign of SSE winds in the forecast where they are, so not quite sure what's going on. Nevertheless, we're plodding on and our noon-to-noon run was 119.8 miles. As I write we have 860 miles to go, assuming we do stop.

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