ARC+ 2021 to Cape Verde - Day 2 (9 Nov)
Walkabout has gone Sailing
Andrew and Traci Roantree
Tue 9 Nov 2021 13:00
Where did Day 2 go?
It seems to have flown by and I’m not sure where it went!!
Walkabout has done a great job so far in keeping us on track and reasonably quick too.
The mainsail has been fully reefed so only a small amount of sail out to the wind and the genoa reefed too so quite conservative sailing. The wind has been up to mid 20’s and gusting higher and the seas are big so we have decided to be safe, secure and comfortable through the night.
We had pre-cooked chicken Korma and potatoes for dinner (classic) before Andrew headed off to sleep while I took the first night shift. It was a dark night with no moon but incredible stars to gaze up at!! A few mandarins and apples later (did I say we have a lot of fruit in board!) and my favourite cup-a-soup and it was time for a shift change and bed.
The morning started grey and remained that way with the sun only showing itself for a moment. With the solar panels having no sun to work with, the generator was started up to give us a boost in power reserves to ensure we had enough for navigation and comms systems.
On start up the generator only ran for a few minutes before turning itself off!
My hero and rock could be found once again crammed into our sea-berth priming the generator in the hope of getting it started! If not, we would have to use the engine to recharge the batteries. Which isn’t a bad option, only the engine uses more diesel than the generator.
We ran the geny for 3hrs and brought the batteries back up to 97% to see us through the night.
We had used the auto-helm for long periods of time as the Hydrovane self steering system wasn’t able to cope with the huge seas and we veered off course a few times. So overnight we felt is sensible to use the auto-helm which does use an awful lot of power but is very accurate in steering a course!
Looks pretty calm here too but I can confirm it’s quite lively still!
We have our Blue Water Runner sail up at the moment and hope to keep it up through the night.
It’s a ‘butterfly’ sail and means we can sail a dead down wind course which is the direction we want to go in to reach Cape Verde.
We have a great ‘shore-side team’ in Ade & Bev who have been invaluable in supporting us through our preparations to date. We also received daily weather updates from them during our passage which have been invaluable and very useful in our passage and sail plan decisions. Thank you both, you have no idea how lovely it is to read your emails and texts xx
Another amazing thing has been our Lindt advent calendar. Emily, James and Ted sent it out with Jamie so we could treat ourselves to a Lindt chocolate each night of our passage to Grenada! What a great idea! Thank you Emily, you are very thoughtful xx It definitely keeps us going through the night!
That’s it for Day 2.
We have sailed another huge 24 hrs with 175 nautical miles done and a total of 351 since leaving Las Palmas.