en route to Ireland -- or Iceland?
Yuva
Jim & Peri Holden
Thu 4 Aug 2016 00:32
posted by: Jim
date and local time (UT): Monday 1 August 2016 16:21
[Apologies as this was written on 1 August but only posted now, due to an error on my part]
We have made reasonable progress since departure and are now 235M NE of Terceira. At 11:00 today we were able to turn the engine off after 28 hours of motoring, when we got to the wind N of the Azores that we were expecting, so for the past 5 hours we have been sailing downwind, making 7+ knots under mainsail and genoa. The wind is currently SW F5 to F6. Sailing directly downwind (ie, sailing NE towards Ireland) in the current wind and waves would be uncomfortable, so we are currently heading just a bit E of N, pointing towards Iceland instead of Ireland, but we are expecting to be able to turn NE’wards towards Ireland again in a day or so.
At about 05:00 this morning we had a bit of an unwelcome surprise when our electronic chartplotter failed, and all attempts to resuscitate it also failed. The chartplotter is a device that we can do without (we have backup methods), but it is much more convenient to have it working, so Peri proved to be the hero of the day when she came up with the simple but entirely brilliant solution of swapping the plotter in the cockpit (the slave unit) in place of the failed identical plotter at the chart table (the master unit), and re-configuring the slave as the master. And it worked! We no longer have a chartplotter in the cockpit, but we are very happy that we now have a working one at the chart table again. As Peri put it, there has been a revolution, and the slave is now the master. Long live revolution, and all praise our hero Peri :-)
Greetings as always to our followers ashore. All aboard are well, as is the boat :-)
S/Y Yuva