Saturday 28th November - Big swell and fast moving clouds

Bamarandi
David & Donald
Sat 28 Nov 2015 16:51
Position 15.10.660N 055.00.244W

Days

Day

Date

Time

Miles to St Lucia

Miles in 24hrs towards St Lucia

Cum Miles towards St Lucia

Ave Miles per day towards St Lucia

1

Wednesday

18th

13:00

2090

 

 

 

2

Thursday

19th

13:00

1901

189

189

189

3

Friday

20th

13:00

1756

145

334

167

4

Saturday

21st

13:00

1605

151

485

162

5

Sunday

22nd

13:00

1423

182

667

167

6

Monday

23rd

13:00

1238

185

852

170

7

Tuesday

24th

13:00

1073

165

1017

170

8

Wednesday

25th

13:00

891

182

1199

171

9

Thursday

26th

13:00

722

169

1368

171

11

Friday

27th

13:00

531

191

1559

173

12

Saturday

28th

13:00

350

181

1740

158


The afternoon and evening passed by warm and sunny with no other ARC boats in sight or showing on our AIS system.  

We re-checked our tender under the boat with the go pro on an extender stick to discover one of the safety straps had worked itself along the hull so we spent a few minutes putting it back in space a re-tightening it. Overall it has worked very well and the additional fixings we added to the tender when we first took delivery of the boat to help stabilise it when on passages have worked well. We took the outboard off before leaving and it has stowed very well on its custom made stand and has not moved an inch.

2 large commercial ships passed by - one passed our stern and one passed our starboard side at around 2.00am / 2.30am.  We hailed the one that looked as if it would pass by our stern and chatted with the very well spoken english captain. His ship was 103m long and very well lit with lights all over it, hard to miss and with a long way to go against the waves to Cadiz!

On handing over the watch Donald told us of very fast moving black clouds that had overtaken us very quickly in the previous 2 hours. The sky was by then clear again and the watch passed uneventfully apart from the very large continuous swell interspersed with choppy waves making for an unusual overall wave pattern and some lumps and bumps for the boat to ride.

M the gull / egret must have found a better ride than us as she has not been seen since.

The wind is right behind us at a constant 18-15kts and we have our genoa flying out wide making good progress. The wind speed and direction would have been ideal for our gennaker.

We seem still to be on schedule to arrive on Monday around mid-day as we have 350nm to go and need to change the clocks one more hour tomorrow.

Everyone is good on board and looking forward to stepping onto land again at the end of this leg of our trip.