Sunday 29th November: on passage from Madeira to Canaries
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sun 29 Nov 2015 16:19
We left Quinto do Lorde marina at 12:45 yesterday in a good NE force 5 to 6, and it stayed that strength until about 2pm to day (it's now down to a more stately F4). We passed between the Islas Salvagem at 9am and are bound for Las Palmas on Gran Canaria as a port of entry. Hopefully the ARC rally will have left, because if not we'll never get a place.
We calculated to arrive in the morning but we've made such good progress - 190.2 miles in 24 hours which is a record for us - that we'll now arrive around 3am and it's not light until around 7:30 so we've taken off some sail and are down to 2 reefs and the staysail whereas while it was F6 we had only one reef and the yankee. We're still doing 6 knots and we need to make 5 on average to arrive in the light so will probably heave-about 10 miles N of the island for a couple of hours in the night. But it's a lot statelier than we were, which was doing 10 at times and in one gust and in a big sea we saw 12.7 knots for a few seconds.
We hope to post some pictures of Madeira once in post with good WiFi (and maybe I will be able to edit the dates so it's not too out of order).