Keoma - 8 December
Dearloves
Thu 8 Dec 2005 19:34
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It is hard to believe, but, after 19 days at sea,
we will make landfall at St Lucia in the early hours of tomorrow (Friday)
morning. We are currently 105 miles from Rodney Bay and sailing along at
between 7 and 9 knots of boatspeed with a large following sea.
We are only using a small amount of genoa for propulsion. The waves have
been stunning today, rising up behind the helm like mountains glistening in the
sunlight and then catching the stern of the boat to propel us forward with
a shove downhill.
 Dawn
 Alice on the dawn watch
 Big waves this afternoon
 The view from the
cockpit
Last night we had a constant wind of around 30
knots, with occasional wind squalls. At one stage we had a rainstorm and
46 knots of wind - a force 9. Amanda was on watch when this hit
us, and got completely soaked but didn't need to intervene - the
autohelm coped brilliantly. Again it was very noisy down below all night,
with everything rolling and crashing with the movement of the boat and
from time to time things falling off shelves adding to the collection on the
floor. This meant that once again it was difficult to sleep. We are
looking forward to a few nights in a marina, where we won't have to take it in
turns to get up to cover night watches and bed won't feel like the inside of a
washing machine.
It will be nice to have an opportunity to properly
tidy up the boat, when we reach land, as well as to clean out the fridge, which
smells so bad you can tell when it is open, no matter where you are on the
boat! We also have ten bags of rubbish in the anchor locker which we will
have to draw straws over to decide who gets the lovely job of removing it and
taking it to the bins in the marina.
 GPS
So far we have sailed over 5000 miles - here is a
track of our journey since leaving Italy in July. Every day when we send
our position into the ARC office, we put a red cross on the GPS. The next
part of our journey will be the Caribbean - to track our progress see www.dearloves.net.
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