Day 4 (Attempt 2) - Beginning to make progress
ARC Crossing 2017
Wed 6 Dec 2017 13:51
Sorry for no blog post yesterday. The hard work of getting ready in Tenerife caught up with us, coupled with a not great wind angle and a dodgy autopilot left us quite tired and flat. We had the kite up for a few hours that afternoon, but dropped it before dark, and then had a slow night. Dave's corned beef hash was good comfort food.
We also couldn't get the Inmarsat to work reliably for a few hours yesterday morning, but we are pretty certain it was because at that precise heading the antenna was trying to look through the radome to get to the satellite, hence poor signal.
Last 24 hours have been much better - we gybed round pretty much onto a direct course to St Lucia. The Inmarsat started working again, and the speed picked up as it was a better tack - 180nm is the most we've managed towards our destination so far on either attempt. Tony cooked a curry for dinner, and the dolphins came to play early evening. 2 or 3 flying fish on deck overnight, and it has begun to warm up! Fair bit of hand teering overnight, then we recalibrated the autopilot first thing, which didn't actually help, but then Arran found out that it works OK using the 'Navigate to a waypoint' function, as opposed to being next to useless on 'Hold a heading' I think everyone feels better about that now, but I think we are generally unimpressed with B&G at this point...
Sailing dead downwind right now, with the main down and one headsail out on each side. Tony is doing various bits of maintenance as chafe points are showing up, and if the weather forecast holds the plan is to hold this course overnight, and then head more SW on the other tack for a day to keep below a light wind patch.
Ecover