Aquavita - Day 23 home stretch

We started a quest yesterday about who would have the most accurate estimate of how many miles we'd do during this crossing. The consensus seems to be between 2950 and 3200nm. Let's see who wins at the end of today, as our ETA is getting into Rodney Bay in the dark. Seems to be our usual pattern, always arriving in the dark after a passage: 2am into A Coruna from La Rochelle, 10pm into Lisbon, 11pm into Lagos, 3am into Mohammedia, 12am into Las Palmas. What time will we arrive today? It all depends on the wind. We had gusts of over 30 knots overnight, but since daybreak it has slowed down a lot so we lifted the blister, hopefully for the last time with no change in wind until St Lucia. At 14.50 UTC-4 we spotted land in the hazy air, it's the soaring mountains on Martinique to our. read more...

Aquavita - Day 22 squall (kinda)

Today I was playing cards with Elke when she saw a squall and it was coming from behind us. It was grey and like a big mushroom cloud. The jib was quickly rolled up while the waves increased by 1-1.5 meters. It was scary how the waves came up, they looked like they were going to crash onto the boat and in the last second rolled underneath our hulls. It was our first squall and, wait - where is it? It seems the squall was coming towards us and then it faded away. It must have decided not to face us because it was scared. ;-)Author: Jason. read more...

Aquavita - Day 21 chat over the water

We saw a boat named Capibara on the AIS 6nm ahead of us. We caught up with them a few hours later and were only half a mile apart at the closest distance. We called them on the radio. They responded straight away and we had a lovely chat. They were a Danish couple who had been sailing for 13 years on their 30 foot monohull. They had done an Atlantic crossing before, and will be crossing the Pacific next and eventually travel to Australia. We exchanged a lot of information about our respective sailing trips, it's almost like chatting with the next door neighbour, except the neighbour is 2km away over the water and we don't even know what they look like. We hope to see them somewhere in the Caribbean. With only a boat name to go by it might be difficult to track them down. We'll have to. read more...

Aquavita - Day 19 cool running

We saw two other boats on the AIS today, one from the ARC fleet (the one we saw yesterday), and a slow boat not part of the ARC. We tried talking to both on the radio, the ARC boat didn't respond (maybe they weren't listening to their radio); the slow boat responded and told us he was solo sailing across the Atlantic. He had been out on the ocean for three and a half weeks, and still had another two weeks to go. My respect to him for taking such an epic journey all by himself. Later we lifted the blister again and were sailing at 7kts. The daylight was dimming when we had visuals of both boats with their sails full, one to the left and one to the right of us, each about 1-2nm away. We were like the three musketeers, parallel to each other, sailing in the middle of the ocean, on our. read more...

Aquavita - Day 20 we'll miss the party

Yesterday we received an email from ARC Rally Control that the social events start on Monday 6th Feb with a sunset cruise welcome party. Our current ETA is Tuesday AM on the 7th - we were going to miss the welcome party! So we sent an email to rally control asking if it's possible to postpone the party to Tuesday, as this year's fleet of 30 is small and several other boats will be arriving around the same time as us. We received a courteous reply today explaining why they couldn't move the welcome party, and that:"Based on current ETAs we will have 18 boats arrived in time to attend the Welcome Party, You are currently the 19th boat, with an ETA of Monday evening. We hope that you receive some good conditions in the final days so you can attend all the parties you wish."We could almost. read more...