Transat Day 2 - 25th November 2008 - light winds
Position: 25:13:10N 17:26:50W
(position as at 1200UTC)
Transat Day 2 So this is what it feels like to do
an 82-mile day! The good ship
“Nutmeg” has been ghosting along doing between 2 & 4 knots all yesterday,
all night and all day today. It
feels so slooow! It appears that
most of the rest of the fleet are in a similar position, although in complete
reversal of what the weather forecasts say, those further West have got more
breeze. Good old weather
forecasts. I’ve never been a fan of being
patient – are there many people of my generation who are? – but this is going to
be one long lesson in waiting. All is well on board; I finally got
some sleep early this morning and I think we are all adjusting into
routine. We started out doing a
2-man watch system with a view to switching over to single-person watches once
everyone felt confident, but since the wind has been so light, we’ve had to
hand-steer since we left – the Aries isn’t sensitive enough to keep us on course
with only 4 kts of apparent wind.
So our watches are 6hrs on, 6hrs off during the day, and 4hrs on, 4hrs
off at night, meaning that it takes 48 hrs to repeat the
routine. No breakages to report but the wear
& tear from the constant movement is going to be immense. I almost think it is worse when the wind
is light because the sails are banging.
I found that the Aries rudder had mysteriously come up at some point –
how it did this is anyone’s guess as you have to slide a metal sleeve down 10cm
against a spring to do this. I
don’t think we’d hit anything because it hadn’t broken on the sacrifical break
point. Only other thing was the
Raymarine chartplotter just lost GPS signal for the first time ever. Seems to be OK now
though. Sunset last
night Course for the next few days will be
to continue towards the Ollie
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