Wind found!
Sunday 30 August
Apologies for the blog delay – yesterday I was too tired and now I’m catching up!
After motoring on and off and heading South on our course we finally found the wind!
The wind angle meant we could put up Lily who went very well with the blue sky.
We whizzed along and ate up some miles!
We all took it in turns to helm as we thought the 18 knot gusts of wind might be too much for Greta but when we did eventually use her she did fine.
The waves were kind and the Atlantic so far is a pretty benign ocean.
Will made fantastic BLTs for lunch – he’s a great galley slave!
Our water maker is working well and we all decided to have a shower today.
Our hydro generator, on the other hand, is not generating enough power – if we go faster than 8 knots it makes mooing noises (it’s now called Daisy) and says it’s overpowered, whereas it should be converting all that lovely speed into charging our batteries.
We tried putting a smaller propellor onto it so we can at least get some charge – David thinks it may be a loose wire or it’s not configured correctly. He will take a look at the next port – we will need it to produce more power when we cross the Atlantic.
We took Lily down before sunset.
We had chicken and rice for dinner and used the table again.
At night we went goose wing which was fine until the wind died down a bit to 12 knots and the waves made for a rather uncomfortable motion.
I tried to sleep but failed and the sun had given me a headache.. we have found the front cabin too near the action for sleeping so David and I are sleeping in the saloon.
For the ARC we will use one of the back cabins and the crew can use the other one, or saloon. It does mean we can use ours to store the storm jib, which is currently Alex’s sleeping companion (and not always well behaved!)
Night watch we are switching partners so I get Alex and David gets Will. We have a super crew! Alex and I write limericks and play word games and Will and David solve the world’s AI problems and discuss practical issues like battery management.
Only 230 miles to go!