Atlantic Crossing Day 11  - Thursday 9^th March 2023

Still becalmed…

We decided to motor for a few hours after dusk and again into the dawn. This kept a little way on (little being the operative word) and charged the batteries perfectly well so we could make water and keep the fridge on. The latter is especially important as the air temperature is 35 deg in the day and mid 20s a night.

On my 0200 to 0500 watch I was lying in the cockpit when I heard a strange almost hissing type noise, I ignored it as I was too tired to think about it, but then it turned into a blowing type noise. Becoming fully awake I saw that we had company, some pilot whales were moving along our starboard side and across our stern. The mate would have loved to see it but she was asleep; luckily for her we had more pilot whale visits on her watch.

Progress has been slooooow. Observant people will see that we’ve headed a little more south and are hoping to get onto the same latitude as Barbados. We’d started this slow procedure a couple of days ago as the grib files showed more wind at those latitudes. This was confirmed early today by a satellite message from John K, who advised the same. In his words “resist the urge to aim for St Lucia” and get more south in the course. This is slightly demoralising as progress is not only very slow, but also now the ‘wrong’ way. I suggested to the mate that we have to regard the four days or so of being becalmed as a break in the middle of our Atlantic crossing, she was happy with that idea. There is a little wind forecast tomorrow, not much, but 10kn plus is much, much better than the 4 or 5 that we’ve had and should enable us to make some decent progress.

The mate hasn’t been fishing again (claiming that we are going too slowly) although her first catch the other day was delicious.

Although we aren’t moving very quickly, it is lovely out here; all we can see is deep blue sea and a clear blue sky dotted with the odd cloud. It feels a world away from ‘ordinary’ land based life and in many ways, it’s much nicer. The mate has just said that it feels like an absolute privilege to be out here.

Right, I’m off to get another grib file to sort out tomorrows navigation strategy…