EMAIL HOME Working our way Through Sail Set Ups - Passage to Cape Verde Day 6
Walkabout has gone Sailing
Andrew and Traci Roantree
Sat 13 Nov 2021 09:00
Another bright, sunny day - and warm at night too. Less than 100 miles to go!!
The last 24 hours have been generally quite light winds, and dropping. We have tried to maximise our speed through varying our sail set up.
We have had the G1 up all day until about 1800. We even went wing on wing (meaning a sail on each side of the boat) with the Main and G1 poled out. But decided that it was a lot of faff for overnight if anything happened, so dropped all that and put up the Blue Water Runner. We are getting better at these things - the whole change over process including sorting the pole took 45 minutes.
As the wind dropped overnight, the boat became quite rolly, and the BWR started to fill and then flop. This makes quite a lot of noise for anyone trying to sleep, and isn’t very good for the sail. By 0330 our speed was down to 2 knots, and at that rate we would have another night at sea before arriving. So we took the decision to put the engine on. This will affect our overall ranking, but as we looked other boats on AIS we could see that the majority were already motoring.
We have sailed continuously (without motoring) for 862NM, at an average speed of 6.3knots. We are pretty pleased with that.
As I write, we have 37NM to go. Hopefully in by late afternoon. We will get some sails up shortly, and see what pace they give us. The wind is currently 9knots.
If we manage to sail at a decent speed and arrive in Mindelo by nightfall, this will be our last 'email at sea’ for a few days while we celebrate our arrival and get down to some boat jobs like fixing the generator .
We have booked ourselves on a tour of the island on Monday and then its preparing for our depart and sail to Grenada on 19 November which will hopefully take us 16-18 days.
Last nights dinner was a ‘usey-uppy’ mix of Greek salad and and then more fruit! We still have a little pre-prepared food left over and so we need to look at our food planning for our next longer sail.
Looking forward to the ‘Land Ahoy’ moment in a few hours after 6 days at sea!
A&Tx