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14:12 15:27.819N
54:59.621W
Well hello there ladies and gents, Barbara here,
day 20 on board little blue.As we sit nearing the end of our journey it is
encouraging to know that lots of boats have mow arrived safely in St Lucia, but
slightly disheartening that we are still out here missing all the fun!
Most of the other boats that do this journey are over 45 feet long, and probably
have lots of crew on board with a freezer full of pre-prepared food each,
and staff to do their chores - not that I mind you understand. I can
cope with the dead fridge, a broken spinnaker pole, and a bit of water in the
bilge. Incidentally we have been inundated with fan mail (well 1) asking
how the 'coffee' tasted. I am pleased to report that the leak seems to
have stopped, or gone somewhere else, as the bilges are now almost dry. So
alas we have not enough 'water' to make the 'coffee' with, so we shall never
know...
It's been interesting sailing with a new and
unfamiliar head sail system which has served us well, but is actually very
inflexible when it comes to anything other than dead downwind sailing, and very
unforgiving of gusts and waves. For the last 5 days we have had the
autohelm as well as the hydrovane running, guiding us along the most direct
route into Rodney Bay. In steady winds we can make good progress (like we
had last night. But the bits where it blew 40 knots were a bit out of my
comfort zone...) Every so often though, a bunch of squalls come
along (like they were doing in the early hours of this morning), and
the wind shifts into a totally different direction thus messing up our intricate
sail set, sending us off the wrong way and adding hours to our
journey.
Yes I'm afraid we're counting hours - mostly cos
Chris has run out of mars bars, but we are all comprehensively sick of the
rolling! At the moment we have about 360 more miles to go, which makes our
current eta late Sunday - early Monday. So I might get one more blog in
before we arrive. Sianara till then!
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