Position: 15:38:90N 42:55:20W

Transat Day 15

20 hours motoring in 24 hrs.  Hmm…  No more than 5kts of wind, mainly from the NW.  There is a little low pressure cell around 100M from us, which has killed off the wind.  I’ve tried sailing a couple of times, but it is painfully slow and at least 40 degrees off course and right now I cannot face being becalmed with still more than 1000 miles to go.  The current’s also not helping us, pushing us backwards by 6M in the last 24hrs.  The forecasts are talking about Trade winds filling in on Mon or Tues, although whether they will or not is still anybody’s guess.  The forecasters are certainly only guessing.

The benefits of motoring are good though – the fridge is cranked up and the beers are cold, the autopilot is steering the boat, so there is little physical sailing to do and we’re onto single 2hr watches at night – which means more sleep, which for me is a real luxury.  I’ve calculated and re-calculated our fuel supply, and although we are playing our trump card now, meaning we won’t be able to motor later in the trip if becalmed, it seems like the sensible thing to do given how light things are.  I calculate we still have another 30hrs of engine time in addition to 2hrs/day batt charging time, leaving a small contingency of 20 litres in each tank.  Hope I have calculated correctly!!

We spent yesterday afternoon having a game of cards in the cockpit, at which I lost catastrophically (again), and reading magazines & books.  Starting to read up on the Caribbean and am very excited as it sounds lovely.  I think we are going to have a ball – what an amazing place for cruising in a yacht!

We are a little over 1000 miles from St Lucia – still a long way, but it feels like we are on a countdown now.  We had a look at the chartplotter and realized that the nearest land is French Guyana, at about 900M, and that the mouth of the Amazon river is closer than the Caribbean!

The weather is lovely – a crisp clearness to the sky that you have to experience to believe.  You can see the clouds dipping below the horizon and I reckon they must be 70 or 80 miles away.  There is a 1m swell but the wavelength is so long that you hardly notice it.  We haven’t seen another yacht in 3 or 4 days now, but we did see a small ship early this morning, heading SW.  There is still the odd seabird swooping round us now and again – smaller than your average seagull but with black edges to their wings.  We also had a small bird that looked more like a big sparrow who circled, looking for somewhere to land, but eventually flew off.

Hope all’s well

Ollie x