Tuesday March 25th ,  2014

St Lucia  ,   14 04.7N 60 57.1W

Today's Blog by David (Time zone: UTC – 4.0)

At around 10 minutes after midday on Monday March 24^th , we finally  tied the knot,  crossing our wake 806 days after we set off from St Lucia.  

In that period we have sailed 30,635 miles …… and learned about a million things!  We have also learned to relax a little – and that is what we are doing now. 

Looking back, I am surprised to see how much of the journey we have motored.  The main engine has been on for 866 hours during our voyage, so we motored perhaps 5,600 miles of the journey. That feels like a lot to me, but that is what the log book shows. It is a fact that, once we do decide to put the engine one because there is not enough wind to drive us, it does tend to stay on for several hours.  I recall a number of occasions where it was on for 12 hours at  time.  

Interestingly, probably the easiest sail, and I think our most enjoyable ocean passage, (and certainly the least eventful!),  was the passage from Cape Town to the Caribbean and was also the one in which we used the engine least. We covered  6,250 miles  using only 52 engine hours, of which the vast majority were used approaching, entering and leaving ports etc. (e.g. motoring the  last say 20-30 miles to ensure we got there before dark etc.). 

We run two fridges and a freezer on board. Together with the autopilot, these consume a lot of power.  Our daily power consumption is over one kilowatt hour (400 - 450 Amp hours at 24V). When the engine is running, the engine charges the batteries;  when it is not, we run the generator for three or four hours a day. The generator was on for 1,229 hours during the journey driving 2x100 Amp battery chargers and powering our water maker (aka desalination plant).   

Of course, we also run the generator when we are at anchor.  The power supplies in Europe and North America are different. While the chargers are versatile and  can use voltages from 100-250V, some of the domestic kit on board (microwave, icemaker, washing machine etc.) can only use a 50Hz power supply so if we are moored in a marina where there is only a 60Hz (American) supply, and we want to use the washing machine,  we need to use the generator to supply the power.

SO: How much fuel do you think we have burned?  My guess is a little over 8,000 litres………  we could have driven over 50,000 miles in a car on that amount of fuel!

I said we had learned “about a million things”. One thing we have learned is self-reliance.  What would have been a crisis three years ago, we now just take in our stride. When things go wrong you just have to get on with it and fix it somehow.  If it breaks at sea, there aint no-one out there who is going to fix  it for you.  Even on shore, you are often likely to do a better job yourself than rely on local trades in most far flung places. We carry a good tool kit and a large selection of spares to cover most routine maintenance. If we don’t have what we need, Oyster’s outstanding  customer support service will ship whatever you are missing to wherever you are in the world. Often the hardest part of the repair is  getting  the replacement parts through the local customs process.

Dramatis personae

Rudi has now left us to crew a race in St Barts.  That leaves Peter and I pottering around for the day before we set off for Martinique in the morning where we will pick up his son, John.  

Yours Aye,

David