PASSEPARTOUT - Fw: Position Update N30:09.21 W43:34.53

Fw: Position Update N30:09.21 W43:34.53

PASSEPARTOUT

Christopher & Nirit Slaney

Sat 5 May 2012 20:14

Saturday morning and day eleven of our crossing. We are still heading due east and will probably stay like this for the coming few days. The day began with the usual routine; but today being a Saturday we treated ourselves to fresh pineapple for breakfast. When you have four people on board you never become really tired as each one only stands a two and a half hour watch every night. This morning we have finally moved the clock one hour forward, this will bring sunset and daybreak more into line with what seems reasonable - dawn was at 3 a.m. before we moved the clock!

Next part of the routine, Shmulik cast his bait out before even having coffee. He was in luck, day eleven brought us a big Mahi-Mahi as predicted by our friend Phil O'Loughlin in a previous e-mail. Once the fish was on board Shmulik gave Yaeli a lesson in pelagic anatomy and I must say she watched bravely as the catch was dissected and seemed to be listening attentively. We have already had MahimMahi sashimi for lunch, it will be fish steaks for dinner and plenty more to in the freezer. Landing and cleaning a fish on board is a messy job but surely worth the effort. After the fillets were safely in the bottom of the freezer Shmulik had to be stopped from casting out another line.

The routine also includes hand steering for an hour in the morning and again in the afternoon. This way each one of us steers two hours daily in order to give the autohelm and the batteries a break.

Since lunch we have been sailing through sheets if rain and rapidly changing winds. This seems to be a warm front passing over us with the message that there's more wind to come in the next twenty four hours, the barometer has sunk steadily to 1008 Mb. We have reduced sail but now have trouble holding our easterly course. Every fifteen minutes or so we switch between large and small headsails and get soaking wet in the process. If this is the warm front then it's at least twenty four hours ahead of the forecast, not a bad thing as we were worried the passage of this low would delay our course change in the direction of the Azores until Wednesday at the earliest. Chris is about to download some fresh weather data from the satellite and we'll maybe have a better idea of where things stand.

No more trade wind clouds and no more north easterly breezes, there's still plenty of seaweed about - a variety known as Sargasso Weed - we've checked and it's not at all tasty. As we are moving along latitude 30 North the weather is still quite mild but Horta in the Azores is at 38 North so we sill have some distance to go, probably around 400 nautical miles from the point where we will hopefully change course. As for longitude, we set out from St Maarten at 62 west and Horta lies at 28 west, so still have to cover quite some distance eastward. If we were able to sail a direct course to Horta we would have less than 900 miles to go, but not knowing where and when we can turn north is likely to stretch this out some more.