Day 14: STT -> Azores - Wind shift

Blue Note
Marco M.
Sat 11 May 2013 14:18
Date: Saturday May 11 2013 - Time: 12:00 Blue Note Time - 10:00 EDT - 14:00 UTC
Position 30:44.37N 41:05.4W
COG 100T SOG 5.5kt, Wind 36T 16 kt, Barometer 1014.8 stable
Temperatures: Air 19.8C, Sea 15.4C
Last 24h Sailed Distance: 124 NM
Last 24h Decrease Distance on rhumb line: 99 NM
Sailed distance since departure: 1644 NM
Time since departure: 14d 1h 00m
Average Speed since departure: 4.88 kt
Average VMG since departure: 4.36 kt
Intention: sail to Horta
Distance to End on rhumb line: 773 NM
ETA: Sunday May 19, 2013
Diesel consumption:
- 48 gallon left
- 58% diesel burned with 66% of passage done, ratio = 1.14
- 103 hours left motoring
- 410 range left on motoring
- Ratio of Distance_to_End/Range_on_Engine = 1.87

This morning the wind shift to the east and forced us to keep a east heading with a loss of VMG.
Right now we are sailing at a VMG efficiency of 62%.
We hope that the shift will continue and allows us to tack and improve our VMG.
.
More and more looks like we will have to skip Horta and go directly for Sao Miguel,
but we will not need to make an hard decision until several days from now, so all figures still indicates Horta as destination.

All good on board .Yesterday and last night we had quite a lot of traffic of cargo ships.
Within an hour we had a tanker going towards Texas passing 1.2 NM to starboard and an hour later a cargo ship
going North-East 2 NM on the the port side.
It felt like been in the middle of a shipping lane..

Right after sunset we also had the surprise visit of several dolphin. They were of very small dimensions,
about half the size of the one I am used to see around the East coast of the US.