I’m sure some boats just come to the Canaries, buy food and cross the Atlantic. The ARC couldn’t be more different, or exhausting. After pretty much two months of work, culminating is inspections, lectures, forms, more forms, and lots of parties, we’re finally ready to go. Really ready to go!

The endless to-do list has - ended.

Weather is ok for the start but rapidly expected to drop to motoring speeds. Geeze, the story of most of the summer. When we are far enough south, the normal trade winds should be in reach and then we’ll be running nicely. The slow start will mean this will likely be one of the slower years for crossing, so more likely to be closer to 21 days, than the 18 days normally hoped for by the cruising division. Arrival 8-10^th Dec ??

The positions of the fleet are sent to us in email once a day, as a text file of lat/lon etc. I’ve written a simple script to be able to get them in a .gpx file and import them into a plotter. So like you, we’ll be able to see how we are tracking to the fleet. However this is only a once a day snapshot for us, so you’ll be better informed.

All’s well so far (we haven’t actually left yet).