Westward Ho

True Colours
James Scrimshaw
Thu 5 Dec 2013 17:24
Position 15:00..02N 029:24.13W
 
Fairly quiet evening and day.  Dinner was a choice of chilli con carne or lasagne, washed down with two bottles of Las Palmas merlot (<£2 per bottle) followed by apple crumble. At 21.00 the wind died, engine back on. A brief flurry of wind in the middle of the night gave two hours sailing, but then it was engine on again until 07.30 this morning, when the symmetric spinnaker went up and engine off.  Within a hour we were achieving speeds of 7.5 – 8.5 knots in winds up to 15 Kn, but then the wind progressively reduced and speed dropped as low as 3.5kn.  Currently (16.20 ships time,  UT –1) about 6 knots and just running into a little rain.
 
In the early hours of the morning we reached our southerly waypoint and turned to head west – next waypoint is at St Lucia 1,832 Nm ahead.
 
No fishing today – we don’t want to throw any more back – it might be bad luck for the future.
 
After a couple of days with no other boats in sight, we have just seen two, one travelling on a parallel course to us, the other heading south under spinnaker.