Day 9 - Go WEST!
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Mon 29 Nov 2010 13:15
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18:18.18N
025:59.13W Off and on, then off and on and off. The wind has
been up and down as if some celestial lunatic were twiddling the dimmer switch
with a wide grin. We saw our southeasterly wind return (shortly after
yesterday's blog post) at about 10 knots and made good time for a couple of
hours, fizzing on towards the Cape Verdes. The blow rose to about 16 knots then
died to nothing within about 25 miles of Santo Antao, the westerly most of the
island chain.
This happened on my watch, from 7pm to 10pm, and I
waited for about 20 minutes for it to return; to no avail. I reckoned we'd come
a little too close to the 1800-metre high island and fallen into its wind shadow
- certainly the speed with which the wind fell from 16 knots to 4 was
breathtaking. We motored a couple of hours west into cleaner air, with the wind
rising and dropping a couple of times on the way. Then, at about 1am, the wind
roared back. There were a few hours of reefing and rereefing, setting sails and
adjusting the windvane, before we fell into a regular rythmn.
The great news is that we're now heading directly
for St Lucia - even if only for a little while before resuming our southward
hunt for the trade winds. But progress is not as fast it should be because we
have nasty choppy seas due to a northwesterly swell thumping into southwesterly
waves.
I think it's fair to say that no-one got more than
about two hours sleep because of the pitching about. Apparently this is what
Alex endured for much of his crossing, and I can understand his envy of our calm
conditions thus far. I reckon it's going to be a quiet day amongst the crew in
spite of the bacon start.
In the end we decided to glide on past Santo Antao
in the night without stopping. We saw its lights, but figure that we still have
more than 50 hours of motoring at our disposal thanks to our extra tanks of
diesel. That still puts us in a position three times more luxurious than our
French friends on Wanako, with their total complement of 37 litres.
Yesterday morning, we passed the 750-mile point
that marks a quarter of our journey on the longest expected route. This called
for a celebration, so we tucked into a bottle of Graham's vintage Guatemalan rum
- remarkably like a good Cognac. We hope that we will not have to cover the full
3,000 miles, but we've taken a cautious stance to be on the safe side and pace
ourselves. In any case, I reckon we'll have overtaken a number of yachts who
lost a day or so clearing in to Mindelo for supplies.
I'm about to download the ARC rankings, so we'll
know shortly...
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