Day 12 - Passage to the Caribbean
Misterx
Sat 12 Apr 2025 23:01
12/04/25
8:30 pm
Day 12
South Atlantic Ocean
DTD : 2,614 NM (100NM)
The Birds Gazette
Birds didn't turn up last night... we had a blissfully squawking free night!
No cleaning up to do this morning! We still deployed the tarpaulin tonight,
just in case but so far, no sign of them... Fingers cross...
Our weather guru is back on line as we are now 160nm away from the equator,
on the bottom edge of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ. He will
be helping us out finding the best course to get through this patch of
tricky water. This is the area were the north east trade winds of the north
hemisphere meet the south east trade winds of the southern hemisphere. This
creates an area of little or no wind but with squalls and thunderstorms, the
famous doldrums. The size of this zone fluctuate all the time and at the
moment it is larger at the easterly side, but the westerly side is where
most of the thunderstorms are taking place in the next few days. So we are
advised to take the middle road, and hopefully we will miss out on most of
the squalls and the nasty thunderstorms. The middle of the road for now is
due north, and the wind is now on our beam, we have had to fold up the wings
as they work best with wind at our back. As the wind dropped, we have had to
put the main up too, which greatly improved our speed, from 3.5 to 5.5knots.
To make things a bit more complicated, there is also a current that we will
try to avoid as it will push us toward the coast, right where the
thunderstorms are, another thing to keep an eye on. We should have another
report from our weather guru, in a couple of days updating the wind and
squalls outlook, and we will adjust our course accordingly. Fortunately we have a full moon with us, this will make it easier to spot the big fat black clouds full of rain.
The upshot of our course adjustment is that we have increased our distance
to destination. Although we will keep it Guadeloupe for the time being, it
is increasingly likely that we will aim for Bermuda as we have greatly
shorten the distance to the island... we'll see how it looks like once we
have passed the ITCZ and we are in the northern hemisphere.
Good news, the batteries reached 100% charge today for the first time in 4/5
days... we may have turned a corner, maybe we will be able to keep above 80%
from now on. Let's see how we get on tomorrow.
We had another lovely days' sail, beam reaching can be an uncomfortable
point of sale as the waves will hit the side of the boat full on, but the
waves are not so big at the moment, so it is confortable... long may it
last.
M