Day 3
Ocean Gem
Geoff & Eileen Mander
Tue 9 May 2017 14:17
Time: Midday
Position: 26:18.90N 65:16.83W
Distance to Bermuda: 364NM
Distance run since yesterday: 147NM
Yesterday afternoon the sky clouded over and the winds dropped. The weather report from the ARC forecast increased wind with some quite strong gusts. But as we were currently experiencing light winds I took the option to turn on the engine, put in a reef and motor sail.
The strong winds failed to materialise, and so too did the strong gusts so we motored through the night in quite modest seas with very little wind. There was some rain but otherwise conditions were benign. As dawn broke things were much the same and we continued to motor sail.
We have three sources of weather information. Chris Parker, a professional weather forecaster gives me his forecast every few days and so far these have proven to be close to spot on. I also use a service provided by a company called PredictWind and their forecasts are also pretty good and in reasonably close agreement with Chris. Then we have the forecasts provided by the ARC.
So far the ARC's forecasts have been poor. I've only been using them since the start of the rally 3 days ago so I'm not sure how they will perform over the coming few weeks. However not only have they often been inaccurate but they are difficult to follow and sometimes contain inconsistencies. It's a good job we have alternatives to turn to.
Later in the morning I thought I would try to temp a fish into the cooking pot and threw a lure off the back of the boat. It was pretty soon spotted by a large Skua who tried very hard to take the bait. Having to extract a powerful angry bird from my fishing tackle was not something I wanted to have to do so I quickly took the line in and stopped fishing
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