November 1st
Bamarandi
David & Donald
Sun 1 Nov 2015 17:29
331nm to go to Las Palmas out of a total passage length from Gibraltar of 724nm. We are slightly ahead of plan and will arrive on 3rd probably ahead of timing on the day.
The day has seen very large swells continuing with long rolling waves. We've had the Genoa up most of the day helping us along at between 7- 9 knots most of the time with variable wind both in speed and direction.
We passed Casablanca on our Port side some while ago and we are between Safi and Essaouira about 80nm off the coast currently.
We've just passed a sailing yacht Velindra to starboard 11m long by 4m wide. They are doing 4kts and we don't envy them in this swell in a monohull! Rather different from the 200m X 33m cargo ship Saga Falcon doing 13kts heading to Montevideo that passed us on the same side a short while ago.
After a night of intermittent rain and lightening we've had a day of mostly sunshine but interjected with a 42kt squall that saw us furl our Genoa and use our Staysail for the first time. We had it made by Doyle in UK and it's a hybrid storm / staysail - a requirement for our MCA charter coding survey. It worked well and kept us under way in the high winds.
It's a lovely sunny evening, the swell has reduced slightly so we hope the night will see it get calmer still.
Everyone doing fine on board, no scurvy broken out yet, rations continue to amaze.
We found another tube of Pringles.
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