Towards St Lucia - Less than 1000 Miles Left
s/y Geronimo - Atlantic Crossing Autumn 2011
World Wide Water Events B.V.
Wed 30 Nov 2011 15:19
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Wednesday 30 November, 2011
Today we celebrated having less than 1000 miles to finish
- although the way we have been sailing it probably means that we have abt. 1250
miles still to go... Right now - since early this morning - we sail with a poled
out genoa heading pretty much straight towards target. The wind, however is
varying, both in direction (80-120 deg) and speed 13-26 knots. Yesterday we
spent sailing under spinnaker; at close to the maximum wind speed for it -
it is a light wind spinnaker. For the night we decided to take it down and
rather sail a little slower than risk also the spinnaker to be shred.
It seems we have finally reached the "steady" trade winds
- let's hope they will stay like this until we arrive!
We have the odd "rainshower", with 100 drops of rain (but
they are big) and then again some sunshine. The temperature allows us to sail in
shorts around the clock as during the day we have abt. 28 deg and during the
nights abt. 25. The water temperature has been steadily increasing as well and
is now at 26.7 deg.
Today we will also set our "shiptime" to UTC-2 hrs, i.e.
we will be 3 hours behind Central European Time.
I guess that you onshore have a better idea of how we are
doing compared to the rest of the fleet - we get the standings once a day
at 0405 o'clock and yesterdays reading wasn't fun as we had dropped to
39th total and 6th in class. Hope that the new winds will help us at least
not lose anymore positions and maybe even improve!
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