Still loads to do but making progress……

Spent Monday going through all the cupboards inside the boat, organising the contents whilst removing as much stuff as possible. Then started loading my clothes/sailing gear and some provisions. Finished by taking off 60m of anchor chain which weighed a ton!

Tuesday saw me finally get around to installing the external antenna for the sat phone (I hate drilling holes in the boat!). With the cable in place I was able to sort out the position of the handset, router and other cables near my nav table to make it all easy to use when under way. Then the moment of truth – with a much better signal I was able to send and receive a test message in under a minute, much better than my previous effort.

I also fitted the replacement 12/240V inverter which arrived nice and quickly and I added another 12V socket for good measure.

The new solar panel arrived this morning so spent the afternoon fitting it and wiring it in. Jobs like this are a pain as you have to remove the headlining panels inside the boat and lift floors etc to run all the wires. Managed to get everything back together OK so am looking forward to seeing how it works tomorrow. 

I’ve started to spent a fair amount of time looking at the weather and practising with the routeing software. The pdf is tonight’s estimation for the route. You can see the ridge of high pressure (in blue) for which the Azores is famous. The routing software uses 4 weather models to look at the weather up to 14 days ahead and then suggests an optimum route for each prediction. It’s up to you which one you chose!. Tonight’s predictions suggest a 10 day journey with wind speeds up to 20kts. The challenge is not to get caught too close to the centre of the high pressure where there is little useful wind. 

Had a look through the latest list of competitors – there are 46 boats, with 14 of us doing it single handed.