Transat Day 9 - 2nd December 2008 - 1000 miles down!
Position: 18:12:40N
29:49:70W Transat Day 9 Hooray! We’ve now done 1/3 of the distance from
The wind dropped yesterday evening
so in the interests of morale (the skippers probably more than anyones) we
turned on the engine for a few hours.
It is not just the fact that you keep moving through the light stuff, it
means you can put the autopilot on, so one of the two on-watch people can get
some rest. For me, it meant an
extra hours’ sleep which was well-needed. The wind came back around midnight,
from the SE, so we broad-reached on flat seas doing 6.5-7kts all night –
lovely! Our sail configuration, of
twin genoas, mainsail & mizzen, is quite versatile for these light winds,
and we can broad-reach up to 120 degrees apparent with the big genoa poled to
windward. She’s quite stable like
this. With a heavy old boat like
Nutmeg, it is a case of trying to maximize the time spent sailing at hull
speed. In the stronger stuff,
there’ll be little advantage to keeping up too much sail but in the light stuff
we need everything we’ve got! Our water supplies seem to be
holding out – I had calculated that we should be reaching the bottom of the main
flexi-tank today but there is still a day or two’s water left in it. So now we know how much we are using, we
are going to switch to drinking the mineral water and using the remaining tank
for everything else. We didn’t have
a huge contingency – we planned for 25 days at 5 litres pppd and I think we are
probably using 4-4.5 litres pppd; and we’re not going to be too short of 25 days
at this rate. No change to the
water-use regime – washing up in salt water; wet-wipe washes. Need to preserve this
contingency. On the fuel, I think we have an
advantage in that Nutmeg has more capacity than most yachts this size – we can
motor for 120 hrs in extremis – and we’ve used 27hrs since we fuelled up on
first arriving in Weather is humid and we had our
first rain shower today. Nights
have been cloudy and consequently very dark – sounds obvious but it makes it
much harder to steer in a straight line when you’ve no stars to
reference. The forecast is rubbish – a dog’s
dinner of low pressure, light winds, squalls and rain for the next 500 miles or
so. Maybe its climate change at
work! (humour). Too much to motor
through so may be another patience-tester.
Still, it looks like it is affecting the boats in front more than us, so
maybe it is to our comparative advantage. Hope all’s
well Ollie
x |