Someone who supposed to be the expert sailor doing 3 circumnavigations told me it was impossible for the Trade Winds not to be there. Never mind climate changes. Some years they might a little further south but due to the rotation of the earth and the temperature differences between the high and lower latitudes the Trade Winds will always be there.

Well, I suppose this someone should come down here and explain us why there is a huge area of very little wind for days on end. Very little wind and coming from the North East. Headwinds sort to speak, certainly not Trade Winds that’s for sure. I guess we should call them Trade Off Winds. Bah. We have been running the engine now for a full day and it looks like will keep running it for some time trying to navigate us out of this area.

Running the engine for a period this long, one has to be concerned about diesel. We don’t have a big diesel tank but we do have extra cans of diesel with me. Today seems as a good day to top of the tank with the spares. After pouring only 110 litres in the tank it was filled to the rim. It meant our trusted Yanmar engine (56 HP) is using little over 2 litres per hour at 1700 rpm. Amazing!

Of course she did get a lot of TLC in Las Palmas including full maintenance with valve timing adjustment, but still 2 litre per hour! The entire trip we’ve been running the engine a couple of times to top up the batteries or get out of some wind calm. But we did that with minimum RPM. This strategy certainly paid off. We still have 260 litre left at our disposal which represents more than 100 hours of running the engine with enough safety margin.

Yannick by the way has found a new (tertiary?) Navigation technique. It does not use coordinates. No that would not be user friendly (are you listening Bill Gates). It does not use areas like the weather areas likes the ARC uses. It only uses the Letters N A E C O ¨space¨ C I T N A L T A¨ in that specific order. At the moment we are at the letter T.

Actually if you put all those letters backwards it spells out ¨Atlantic Ocean¨ a word that is displayed in the centre of our chart plotter and the symbol representing SeaWalk is gently going from letter to letter towards St Lucia. And from time to time Yannick will shout: ¨We are at letter C now¨ or something like it. Agreed, it is not a internationally acceptable method but if all ARC yachts would use our (golden oldie) chart plotter, position reporting to the ARC would be much more fun.

Today I suggested to Isabelle going fishing again. She agreed that she could find some room in the menu if I did caught a fish. So the lure went overboard again. And Bingo! Within 2 hours I look back at the boat and see a big trail of white water some 70 metres behind the boat. At that moment I was topping up the diesel tank with Yannick so we had to split tasks. Yannick reeled in the fish while I closed up the tank temporarily.

He brought in a nice looking Barracuda of about 75 centimetres. It looked pretty big if you ask me. I hooked it with the Gaff Hook and landed it on deck. It weight somewhere in between 5 and 10 kilo’s. And I made some nice fillets out of it. Isabelle cooked up a real nice Risotto so diner was once more (and as always, did I mention Isabelle cooked up French Fries with fresh Sausages yesterday, yummy?) truly a feast. I truly feel sorry for Windancer having lost all their hooks. Getting fresh fish on the diner table is definitely a good thing.

At the moment the weather is fantastic. Unfortunately no wind but very warm and sunny. Inside all the windows are open to get some breeze in. On our eve - and night watches, we only need to wear shorts and shortsleeve shirts. Just over a week ago we were still sitting in the cockpit with all our gear on to keep from being cold. Yannick, sleeping in our front cabin where it is especially hot, prefers sleeping on deck as it is atleast nice and cool there.  What a nice change!

Tomorrowmorning is our 1000 miles to go party, don’t miss it, some VIP tickets are still available at the ARC office located in the front cabin at SeaWalk.