05:21:87S 116:30:75W
The Adventures of Sunboy the Sailboat
Al Sparkes and Deb Swain
Tue 1 Jun 2010 21:23
A bit later in the morning for the blog today, sorry if you stayed up to get it :)
Current weather; overcast, occasional squall, seas a tad rough, occasional big swell to 6 metres. Winds gusting to 27 knots.
We had a pretty ordinary day yesterday as far as weather and sea conditions were concerned. Wind came up, seas came up and poor old arthur the auto pilot had a tough day. The exciting news for the day was we crossed over the half way mark of 1525 miles to go. It happened on Nikki's evening watch so she won the mystery watch leader award, woohooo!!!
We have been sailing for a few days now with two reefs in the main and mostly a full headsail but yesterday we furled the heady a bit to stop the boat rounding up in the big swells. The boat generally maintains a pretty steady course but the occasional big wave that roars in from the side tends to push the stern of the boat around which of course pushes the boat more up into the wind which causes her to take off a bit and gather a lot of speed very quickly and cause the auto pilot to have a bit of a coniption, and the 'boat is off course' alarm bleeting out incessently. We clocked another plus 200 miles for the 24 hour period ending at 8.00am this morning so the stronger winds are having a benefit. All the evening watches were pretty similar with the auto pilot alarm activating with regular monotony. The wind started to pick up about 5.00am so I decided to take to the helm and crank up the speed a bit to try and bust through the really sloppy sea conditions and get ahead of some ordinary looking weather coming up from the south east.
So hope to be able to report on time tomorrow, hope all are well at home.
Best regards to everyone..............