Day 3 - Reeling them in (boats not fish)
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 23 Nov 2010 09:42
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24:45.70N
017:08.67W
We're crossing the sea border between Morocco and
Mauritania as I write. The spinnaker has been up all night long, so we've been
hand steering for our four hour watches. The wind vane is not accurate enough at
steering downwind to keep the chute filled. That makes for some pretty
exhausting work. However, the effort has paid off, as we have been making
between 6 and 8 knots for the last 12 hours.
In competitive terms, we're reeling in yachst that
we couldn't see last night. And the ones that we could see have all dropped
astern. There's only about 18 knots of wind, but we reckon that is the
operational safety limit of the spinnaker, so we're going to investigate
snuffing it after breakfast and broad reaching with the main and gib
instead.
As the boats spread out, the radio banter has
evened out a bit. We picke up snatches of conversation last night which
suggested large numbers of boats had headed east, not west, from Gran Canaria in
an effort to pick up stronger winds down the African coast. I reckon that the
lost westing will make that a dubious decision. In any case, we're expecting the
tail end of a big north Atlantic low to give us a good northwesterly wind later
in the week, which will allow us to reach towards St Lucia.
Morale is high and the proviosions seem to be
stretching so far. Sea legs have been rediscovered all round and Alex is
preparing a fruit salad to dispose of some of our huge quantity of ripe,
dripping fruit.
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