BVIs to the Azores - Day Eight 27 41.950N 054 56.196W

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Wed 4 Jun 2014 21:49
This passage seems to have everything! After the lovely weather to start with, the thunder and lightning, the squalls and now strong winds and big seas! It was a fairly quiet night and we were making a comfortable 5 to 6kts when at 06.30 the wind shot up to 20kts, then 25 and then stayed around 25 to 30kts for the next 3 hours with big breaking seas. By this time we were down to just the staysail, still making around 5kts on a close reach. It was quite comfortable considering, but we took a lot of water over the deck. At 09.30, as if someone had flicked a switch, it dropped to 16kts and the seas calmed down. Still lumpy, but no longer breaking and they've been dropping more during the day. The main is now back up and the working genoa fully out and we're making around 6kts, close hauled in the right direction. It now looks like we have reached the wind circulation around the Azores high and so are heading NE, hopefully to eventually go round the top of the high. But it does depend on how the high moves around. If we're lucky it will come more south so we don't have to go too far north to get round the top and head on east to the Azores. Fingers crossed! Our noon-to-noon run was about 126 miles and we have 1,469 miles to go.

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