18 10 N  51 55 W

Well the forecast hours of rain never materialized as the weather made a big shift during the day yesterday to becoming pleasant with drier air, sunshine, no more squalls!!....and a relatively calm/slight swells sea state. As this started to become obviously different from the quite recent weather that I had downloaded, I went back through our data connection and got a weather update that was 6 hours more recent. Now the bad news: the new weather showed the whole rainy system had disappeared from the track we are on as had the winds that were to follow the wet weather. Now…how were we going to get to St Lucia with any haste?  The new forecast showed no winds until the 22^nd and here we were over 700 miles out on the 19^th…..and not enough fuel to take us that far at all. Anyway, we powered up and used about a dozen hours of fuel interspersed with some wonderful sailing….sailing to die for…great seas…easy beam or broad reaching at boat speeds of 6 to 8 kts. I figured  yesterday (LOTS of “figuring”)  that we had to cover about 250 nm by wind and we could manage the balance with fuel if needed. Looks promising from what we have been experiencing over the last 24 hours….now to take a look at today’s 0600 UTC weather forecast that is available to me as of 1200 UTC….i.e. this time now when I upload this blog entry. Currently making 8 kts (average last 4 hours – TERRIFIC!) with wind power only and under very pleasant sunny skies and rising barometer. DTG 578 nm

Oh, speaking of believing what you see…DON’T!...although some of our friends actually think we went bounding off on a dog-leg Northwards on the 16^th….No!...that was a keystoke error on my part as I was bouncing along and trying to hit the right keys to input latitude and longitude. Our position that day should have been 22 23 N.