Since Bill wasn't doing anything else Libeccio decided to play some tricks on him. First she decide that the autopilot should make sharp turns to port (or the Left side of the boat- easy to remember because Port has the same number of letters as left) anytime Bill tried to use it.  You would be smart to think it was 'user error' but fortunately it repeated it's behavior with Kevin watching, since the numerous sharp turns brought him running to the cockpit. It did cross our minds that we might have to hand steer all the way to St. Lucia but after an afternoon nap the autopilot resumed working normally.  We'll see how it behaves on Bill's next watch.

 

The winds have been variable all day, ranging from a low of 4 mph to a high of 21-22 mph. For us that means changing the sail plan fairly often.  Right now we're running a 1 reef main and a full genoa but if you don't like that arrangement just wait 20 minutes. 

 

We are now well away from Gran Canaria and passed Tenerife more than 70 miles too our north.  We're this far south because Tenerife's wind shadow extends pretty far.  Sail too close to Tenerife and you slow way down. 

 

The seas change with the winds so we've had waves ranging from the current 2-3 feet to 6-9 feet.  The larger rollers give us a chance to show off our steering skills since you try to make an S curve down the face of the wave. 

 

The angle of the wind means we can't sail directly downwind but have to sail a broad reach (meaning that the wind is coming from behind us- if the front of the boat was 12 noon, then the wind would be coming from 4 or 5 o'clock) but that leads to the possibility of an unexpected gybe where the main sail and its boom moves rapidly from one side of the boat to another because the back of the boat has passed through where the wind is coming from. Bill has taken a good lead in the unexpected gybe category with no one else having accomplished even one.  Jane tried to coax Bill into a third gybe after lunch but Bill was happy to sit on the two he had in the bank.

 

Hopefully you are all tracking our smooth straight line run from Las Palmas to our first major way point of 25 degrees north and 25 degrees west.As Kev has explained the wind has not behaved and we have had to adopt a subtle vig vag approach.So far there have been no need of the oxygen masks although Mike came close to the sick bags at 2am this morning.A good recovery is in progress.All settling into the rhythm of life on Libeccio and fingers crossed the weather behaves and we can get into some good down wind saiing tomorrow.First signs of a new moon spotted this evening.

 

Kevin has spent more time today as the ship's engineer than as the captain and doing it extraordinarily well.  His sage advice about the autopilot, leave it alone then reboot it, has gone down in maintenance manuals as wisom for the ages.  In future we expect to see his immortal words done in kneedlepoint and scrawled across tee shirts.   Seriously, we're very confident that Kevin can fix anything on the boat. However we are not going too far to verify that because we don't want any other answer.

 

 

We have successfully sent and transmitted emails (that's how we get our weather forecast) so family members should expect to recieve one or two emails along the way.  The rest of you are stuck with this blog.