Sailing along
African Innovation
AJ
Wed 5 May 2010 17:59
|
We may not be moving fast, but at least we're not
motoring. We now have a slow, but comfortable ride for sail. In the past 24
hours, we only used the engines for 2 hours and that was because we took down
the gennaker and put some extra chafe protection on the halyards. Basically the
area where the halyards comes out of the mast is a problem, when it is under
load. We seem to be keeping the chafe in check with whipping twine.
So our third day of sailing looks
like:
We logged 126 nm of which 127 brough us closer to
Hiva Oa (the current is favorable).
Our average speed was 5.25 knots
We ran the engine for 2 hours.
Average wind speed was around 9
knots
We now have 2550 nm to go before we make
landfall.
We are now 18 hours into our 4th day and
so far we've run the engine less than an hour, but the wind has dropped to
an average around 7 knots and our speed with it.
Still confidence is high and we are having fun and
up till now the weather has been gorgeous.
Yesterday we saw a huge shark swimming around us.
Easily the biggest one I've ever seen. The distance from the dorsal fin to the
fin on the middle of the tail was around 3 meters, and we are almost a 100% sure
it wasn't a whale shark. Needless to say, no one was interested in going for a
swim.
It looks like we're heading into some rain now and
hopefully we'll get some more wind as well. Anything above 10 knots is
excellent. From the looks on the grib files it is on the horizon ... we just
need to get there.
- Andreas
2:51.01S
96:49.10W |