Day 22...... The line awaits!

Zahara: The story so far......
Ron Dunn
Mon 14 Dec 2009 13:28
Team effort for the last day....
 
Well, I (Ron) don't know what to say really. At the moment we have just 59nm to St Lucia plus another 5 or so to the finish line. The weather has been difficult these last couple of days with quite strong and shifty winds and with showers and squalls coming through. This means we are always adding or removing sail. We have been reasonably cautious as having too much sail up as the squall hit could cause damage both to the boat and my bank balance. So, more sail and speed when we are able and accepting a slower spell when required. I think this approach has cost us a few miles each day but breaking things would cost a lot more. We are looking at 22 1/2 days in total which far exceeds my expectations when we started out. However, the constant strong winds has helped the bigger boats so, even afetr handicaps are applied, we won't have done too well. Do I care?....... Noooo! 
 
We expect to be moored up sometime this evening and the prospect is quite unreal. I'm not sure I believe this is happening at the moment as we are still doing all the practical things and we need to make sure that in all the euphoria we don't go in without fenders etc! Sometime this afetrnoon St Lucia should appear over the horizon, maybe then I'll start to believe....
 
Over to Larry ....
 
Well, caution or not, it's just hit the pocket! Whilst Ron was finishing his bit above, a big squall came through and broke one of the whisker poles (sticky out thing like a spinnaker pole). We then had fun between squalls detaching the pole (which by this stage was trying to break the hatch on the foredeck) from the mast and sail.
Still, job done and now wait for the latest Squall to clear before resetting the sails to match the new configuration. In the meantime, we're headed toward the finish line with the loss of about one knot of speed.We'll try to recoup that in about 30 mins when time it's fit to get on the foredeck
again.
 
Whatever happens, the line isn't far away, and I think it is fair to say that it will be very welcome!
 
We'll enter the results on the blog tomorrow, when we've recovered.
 
Larry and Ron