Current position "22:58.5N 22:07.0W". We continue to make good progress. It’s clear we’re doing very well on our tactic, though many of the fleet are choosing to go for a more direct route to St Lucia, but at the risk of losing winds and getting stuck becalmed. We’re taking a more conservative view of wanting to make sure we have decent winds throughout, though one generally hears that avoiding being becalmed completely is unrealistic. There’s an element of luck in all this of course, so let’s see. Yesterday Chris conducted a series of boat checks to make sure no small breaks or threats go undetected. We identified a couple of small items only, but good to get into this habit.

 

Graham’s astro navigation continues to work well which he’s really pleased with. We check each time to see what the error versus the GPS is, but we do not use the GPS data; we only navigate basis what we know from Sun and Moon sights with a sextant. Recent errors are all under 10 nm, with a range of 5, 6, 8 nm. This is good accuracy and certainly good enough to get us to St Lucia.

 

The last 24 hours was filled with ups and downs of spinnaker and its associated pole – up to get speed, down when we had too much and worried about tearing the spinnaker [Graham’s rule: Don’t break the boat!]. All good training to get us doing this faster and error-free. Meanwhile the waves have been getting bigger and bigger - tending to be long Atlantic rollers so alot of fun to try to get the boat surfing down, but also hard work with a spinnaker trying to keep it pulling in the right place. All said, we were able to make lots of progress – in the last 24 hrs we covered about 170 nm, or an average speed of 7.1 knots. This is pretty speedy as an average over 24hrs for a cruising boat, but no doubt a mark we’d like to surpass later on.

 

I don’t have any great new pics for today, so I’ve added two from previously when there were too many good ones – one of James seeking to handle Becca and his god-son Benjamin the evening before the start, and the other at the start.