13:32N 63:40W

World ARC 2016 Day 2

Wing-on-Wing and a Prayer

or Two sails good, Three sails better.

We motor sailed for most of the night.

Flaky poor winds meant we followed the rest of the fleet, who powered away in front of us as we hung on hoping for a change, before finally giving in and turning on the engine. It was getting pretty roly and sickness inducing, so never mind the macho stuff boys, we kicked the donkey into life and powered through the night at a very steady 1,500 rpm.

We put up our sails after the dawn, when the wind settled and kicked in again, giving a glorious days sailing of 10 to 14 knots throughout the day.

Skipper Steve remembered a conversation with the big Oyster boys, about trade wind sailing, using the staysail when running wing-on-wing. Pulling out the stay-sail hard against the mast, fills in the gap between the Gennaker and the Mainsail. The theory is that it increases the sail area and effectiveness, and also preventing some of the roll induced by wing-on-wing.

Nina has a self tacking inner Gib, a tribute to her Baltic heritage.

We gave it a try.....

Fantastic results can be reported.

It certainly reduces the rolling, although we are sceptical about amount of increased speed reported, but perhaps under certain apparent winds and directions, it gave Nina half a knot extra. Not to be sniffed at, and made for a much better sail.

We will continue to use it during the day, but we put it away and reefed down for the night due to squalls.

There are lots of squalls about us. Nina has threaded the needle so far, having had banks of black thunderclouds rolling down both sides,and we have so far only had couple of close calls. There is no moon at present, so we are now able to use the Radar, which was a casualty of the weather and seas at the start of the Atlantic crossing. It has been fixed (again) Luxury! We are now able to watch the rain showers overlaid on the chart plotter screen, big patches of yellow and purple which is the rain coming down under the squall clouds. So far this has been only watching..................

Fishing today produced some fantastic results.

We caught two big clumps of Sargasso weed on both of our new lures, so we are looking for recipies, preferably tasty ones. Can you eat the blooming stuff? It is clumps of quite tough frondy weed. Probably not, although veggies may tell differently?

Perhaps tomorrow we will catch some fish instead. Yellow fin Tuna and Dorado have been reported catches from around the fleet today. We are living in jealous anticipation. Steve and Chris have implemented all the advice gleaned from various 'fisherman' both in St Lucia and around the World ARC fleet.

"they mustn't see the hook in the lure"

"they cant see the trace"

"they like pink and white lures in the Caribbean sea"

"It needs to be out of the wake of the boat"

Grrrrrrrr, We thought they were stupid with the memory span of 5 seconds?

The famous words of an old crew member crossing the Mediterranean last year, Mike Maslen

"Steve, its called fishing, not catching" Don't we know it, Mike!

For those in need of sustenance, Lynda prepared a superb Chicken Soup which sorted hungry and sensitive stomachs of the recently arrived crew.

Lesley mentioned something about being 'seasick , Steve' ; our Captain told us he had seen the aforementioned artist in Southampton............Lesley continues to recover.