its 3pm (20:UTC) 8 Feb. Our pos is 03deg04.073N, 086deg27.495W
Late last night a light NE came up, a difficult wind to sail with as the boom slams around in the rolly seas, i eventually worked out a good way of restraining it, but the restraining rope pulls the boom to hard which makes the sail too flat .... nevertheless we still easily managed over 4knots in 8 knots of wind! Not bad for a heavily loaded fat cat. After a while the wind dropped again BUT by 6am this morning it was humming at 15knots easterly nicely on the beam and we have been hauling ass as Andy says for the past 9 hrs averaging 8-10knots GPS speed on a beam reach holding perfectly on our rhumb line. We are eating up the miles! In fact our last 8 hours yielded 64 miles which gives us an average of 8 knots! We are finding that we often exceed half of the windspeed in boat speed: i.e. we will do 8 knots in 15 knots of wind for example. And this is in a CRAP ocean with huge speed bumps and nasty cross swells. A few BIG slams under the bridge deck. The sea state has NOT improved but we are not complaining. Somebody's prayer for wind has paid off! We are well over the half way mark to Galapagos. The last 10 hrs was all we needed to easily get there on our fuel so thats no longer a concern. Still no fish. Andy is still queezy but he does all his watches no problem. Thats all from us for now, we are at that stage of the cruise where are heads are down, pedal to the metal. If all goes well we may do a 200 mile day!
