Transat Day 2 - 25th November 2008 - light winds

Nutmeg of Shoreham
Ollie Holden
Tue 25 Nov 2008 13:06


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 Cape Verdes, and wait for the trades to fill in.  There are small areas of low pressure disrupting the flow all over the place, and until these disappear it’s going to be a slow ride.  I don’t think any speed records will be broken on this particular ARC crossing.

 

Ollie x