Day 85, Friday 7th November 2003

Samsam
Fri 7 Nov 2003 15:11
Position at noon :  29 57,904 N, 012 23,949 W

Around 01:30 we get some winds and we put mainsail and genua. We get a decent speed of 6-6,5 knots. This last till 04:00 when the wind comes below 4 knots. So back to the engine. Today was more difficult to sleep. They say that only after 3 days you will find your rhythm. This will be the day we arrive. Although, we are not sure yet. Basis now we could arrive around 14:00 hours tomorrow afternoon, but for sure we will not manage to keep this speed. Later on we hope to be able to sail. We do not like to enter an unknown port in the night, which means we will have to spent one more night on the ocean and will enter the port at daytime on the 9th November.
We call Oscar via Iridium and find out that they are about 90 miles ahead of us. They are much more westerly and are now enjoying NE winds of 15 knots. In the afternoon I test the watermaker and it seems to work. We will now try to fill one of the watertanks. It makes 5 ltrs and hour, so it will take 30 hours to fill up a tank. We still have to see how we manage with electricity. Upto now, we never had the batteries below 75 % and could not test sufficiently the solarpanels and the windgenerator. We have done far too much on engine and than the batteries are charged with 65 amp per hour, so no chance to empty the batteries.