Day 14 - Nearly there

ARC Crossing 2017
Sat 16 Dec 2017 13:48
13:50.2N 51:15.3W at noon GMT.  565nm to go.  166nm made good last 24hrs, 178nm & 173nm previous days

It's been a quiet few days on Ecover - we've been settling into tradewind sailing, with the main concern how to maximise our VMG towards St Lucia.  With the restart, we have missed the ARC finishing line, and will miss the closing party tonight, so the final 'target' is to make it into Rodney Bay before Sam has to leave St Lucia at lunchtime on the 19th.  We've passed a number of waypoints, including 1000nm to go 'closest land' moving from Suriname to Barbados, and overnight, 600nm to go.

We've had a little rain, which is nice and cooling.  It reached 32C on one of the afternoons.  The night of the 13th/14th the Geminids meteor shower put on a cracking display. The winds dropped off enough yesterday for us to put the kite up.  This involved hoisting the repared furler 'sans sail', putting it under tension and Arran going up the mast to check some markers we'd put on.   That held, so down it came, then up it went with the kite. Happy days!  Otherwise we've been running with the genoa poled out.

Food has included beef stew, pasta carbonara & pizza.  Adam's first attempts at star sights didn't work out too well, but hopefully better this morning (sights taken, but not plotted yet)

Stop press - After a good couple of hours this morning (9kn straight towards St Lucia) sadly now the kite is ripped.  We won't be able to repair it at sea, so we are down to white sails for the rest of the trip.  Fingers crossed the wind stays up!