POSITION REPORT ON FRIDAY 2 MARCH 2018

The Alba Chronicles
Neville Howarth
Fri 2 Mar 2018 09:26

POSITION REPORT ON FRIDAY 2 MARCH 2018 AT 0700

 

12:13S 17:58W

 

So far we've done 755 miles with 1,045 miles to go to Jacaré, Brazil. We did 120 miles in the last 24 hours.  We have 30% cloud cover and 8-112 knot ESE winds.  We’re sailing wing-on-wing doing 4 to 5 knots with a 1 metre swell. Here's what we did yesterday and overnight.

 

1 March 2018   St Helena to Brazil (Day 6)

We’re over 1/3 of the way now, which is encouraging, but the thought of another 10 days is discouraging.  It was another lovely day pottering along at 4-5 knots.  The weather forecast is for the wind to veer slightly and pick up later tonight and it looks like a band of rain is going to go over us tomorrow.

 

Our wind generator has been turning too fast and isn’t producing any power, so I did some investigation and changed the bridge rectifier.  There isn’t enough wind to test it properly, but when we get the odd gust, it hasn’t been free-wheeling, so fingers crossed.   For the rest of the time when I wasn’t sleeping, I wrote more of my Alba User Manual, which has turned into a chore, but now that I’ve started, I want to finish it.  Oh, and I finished off the afternoon by playing a bit of guitar.

 

Glenys did some sleeping, some reading and a some stainless steel polishing on the stern arch and then produced baked Fish Pie for dinner with stir-fried cabbage.

 

Just before sunset, we gybed the main to starboard and poled out genoa to port in anticipation of the wind veering later.  The wind is directly behind us so it doesn’t really matter what tack we’re on.  There were a few more clouds around as night fell and the wind picked up to 10-15 knots, so we were doing 5 to 6 knots through the water, but that didn’t last long and we were soon back to 4 to 5 knots.  It was another lovely night with a very bright full moon.