Position: 18:12:40N 29:49:70W

Transat Day 9

Hooray!  We’ve now done 1/3 of the distance from Las Palmas to St Lucia!  Feels good. 

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 Las Palmas.  Given I assumed we’d use 2hrs a day just on battery-charging duties, that means we’ve only used an additional 9hrs more than we would have used if we’d just used the minimum – and I think that pushing through to the new breeze in 6hrs motoring will often bring a far bigger advantage that wallowing in no wind for 12hrs.  So it’s all justified in my head! :o)

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