Time: 9 dec 19.30

Position: 13:58.46N 59:35.25W

Speed: 9 knots

Distance sailed: 2610 NM

Weather: ENE guessing windspeed 17-20 knots, beautiful night!

 

I was told today that I have missed out on giving our position in the blog so I guess that on the blog’s map we haven’t moved much

 

So for our last blog on our way to St Lucia – these last 24h have been heavenlike! This morning the wind took more speed just before sunrise. I could hear the guys in the cockpit shouting “wouahhhhh we are surfing at 16,4 knots!!!!” with Johan stearing. Johan has actually always been the lucky one to manage to stear during the speed toppings?... The rest of the day  the wind has been stable at around 12-15 knots and spinacker 3 has shown to be more tenance than we thought it would be.

 

Every morning after breakfast comes the longing mails from our friends who are following us, giving us valuable reports. Thankyou to Helén (Olof’s  wife), Mado, Freddy, Lotta&Christer (Louise’s family) and Håkan (friend to the Wennbergs)! Your cheering reports have been so valuable and joyful! This morning’s report gave us extra competition taste and the competition horns have really grown out on all of us. However we are most happy that our strategy taken 5-6 days ago has so far shown to be a winning concept.

 

A few days ago we saw the gribfiles telling us that in a few days there would be a weather change north of rumbline (the straightest way to goal) before St Lucia giving us bad winds. We interpreted it as pretty bad and we didn’t want to end up stuck on a parking lot in the Atlantic. So our eminent navigator Olof took the strategic decision that we should leave rumbline and “dive” more southwards although this meant a detour of 50 extra NM. We moved our course South - South West like an arch which we predicted would give us more favourable winds when the wind change would come according to the weather forecast. We actually sailed in the wrong direction for 4 days and yesterday it paid off.  The wind changed to East giving us the best wind angle in straight direction towards St Lucia – now in full spinacker at around  18 knots. Last night we managed to take in on a few boats and now we are working on taking in more boats before crossing the arrival line at Pigeon Island on our way to Rodney Bay in St Lucia.

 

The day has been just like we’ve all been longing for. Steady winds & small waves = little roling in the boat. Beautiful weather and everyone took their time reading a book, sitting on deck relaxing, playing cards with the kids in the cockpit, having both lunch and dinner with the table up in the cockpit, enjoying time together as well as taking time for ourselves – in other words a really lovely and relaxing day on the sailing boat. We even got the priviledge to taste our home made yoghurt (thankyou Clare for your tip, it was easy!) and home made bread for breakfast (the Spanish self raising flour didn’t really work out, but it tasted good ). And on time for the sundowner we celebrated “only 100 NM to go” for St Lucia with some cava.

 

The last day with the ARC on the Atlantic is forever printed in our minds as one of the most memorable one!

 

Now according to our ETA (estimated  time of arrival) we have less than 12 hours to go before we arrive in St Lucia.

 

See you tomorrow for some rumpunch!

 

Take Off
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