Day 3,4
Gins.pt
Wed 25 Nov 2009 22:57
|
The sailing during the night was as fast as during
the day before. I had the early morning watch and have enjoyed the sun
rise.
We have 3 watch teams : Marko & Boris,
Jure & Matjaz and myself alone. During the day from 8 to 20 the watch is 4
hours and during the night 3 hours. This way we have 3 nights in a row watches
at different times and then the cycle goes on. And everybody gets 6 hour
sleep per night.
At 11am we made a turn to the west and are sailing
goose wings ( butterfly) We still have strong winds from 20 to 25 knots with
occasional gusts up to 30 knots. This is too much to put the spinnaker
on.
We were looking at the positions of the boats an
saw that majority of the skippers took the straight line towards St. Lucia
contrary to us. We selected the option to go fast
towards the steady trade winds which blow below the
20 degrees north. From now we are on the direct course and every mile will
count.
Jure prepared an excellent meal - pork fillet
steaks with the
mixture of potatos, finochio and parmigiano
cheese, baked in the oven.
During the night we had a problem with the
furl as we could not shorten the genua sail. I left it to solve in the
morning
and had hardly any sleep after it happened. Finally
it was not that bad as I feared. The unused spinnaker halyard had too much slack
and started rolling around genova at its top - blocking it, which we did not see at night.
This morning was again sunny with the same wind so
we continued without a spinnaker. Today we saw one yacht
crossing our way towards south. The pleasant part
was that
crew was having a shower while the generator
and water maker were running full power.
The feeling of being clean inspired Jure to prepare
an extraordinary meal, already one day before Thanksgiving.
Beef filets with goose lever and avocado with cous
cous as a side. I contributed a sacred bottle of St. Christina, excellent red
wine from Tuscany.
The wind is decreasing to 15 to 20 knots now in the
evening, but the night is very dark and we shall keep our spinnaker under the
bed - to have a peaceful night with one or two knots less speed. Safety first
!
We have received the positions of all boats
and we are now somewhere in the midlle of the fleet regarding the miles to sail
to St. Lucia. Quite an improvement after the first 2
days.
|