Snowmane - Snowmane - Final Day

Land ho! It's 8:18am Snowmane time on Friday December 13th. 7:18am St Lucia time. The sun rose an hour ago and revealed land ahead. We can see both St Lucia where we are headed and Martinique over to our right. The water still looks like glass. Not sailingconditions but it's absolutely beautiful. Over to our left, not too far, is another ARC boat motoring along at a similar speed. There are quite a few other boats that we can't see but we know are also very close, all coming in for a similar finish time. The boat on our left is the onethat rescued a catamaran many days ago. The catamaran had lost their rudder and were taking on water. They called a mayday and were picked up by this boat. They have done over 2000 miles on the one boat. I wonder what emotions they are all going through. read more...

Snowmane - Day 16

8:30am on day 16. We are sailing along at around 7 knots in about 18 knots of wind. Pointed dead down wind which is pretty much straight to St Lucia. I am doing my morning watch. Everyone else is in their cabin. The waves aren't small but theyaren't as big as they sometimes are. The sun has come up and it's a beautiful blue sky. Warm but not too hot yet. This is pretty prime! We have about 620 miles to go. The winds are forecasted to be good today and tomorrow but there is a huge dead wind hole that we are going to end up in at some point late Tuesday or on Wednesday. It looks like that might then go for days. Weare trying to get as much sailing in before that happens so that when we need to motor, we have the fuel to do so. I think we can motor about 400 miles if we absolutely have to.. read more...

Snowmane - Day 14

850 miles to go. That's further than we have ever sailed before, prior to this crossing, and yet it now seems like not too far at all. If the weather cooperates we should be able to do that in 6 more days. We were playing around on the map today. Did you know that it would have been a shorter distance to sail to Halifax from the Canaries than to sail to St. Lucia? It would be a terrible sailing route, through some really nasty storms in the northAtlantic but less miles. Way way further to sail to south Africa though. Our stupid northern projection maps don't show that properly. The weather where we are sailing has been pretty good. The waves and wind are down from what we had previously. That means we aren't hitting 165 miles in a day any more but it is a bit more gentle of a sail. The. read more...

Snowmane - Snowmane - Day 12

It's the early morning of day 12. Yesterday started quite badly but ended up really well. At 3am, Jo, who was on watch, noticed that one of the bolts attaching our Hyrdo Vane had snapped. This put the whole hydro vane at risk of ripping off the back of the boat. She quickly alerted the other adults and we worked efficiently to takethe wind vane and the rudder off which removed all of the pressure on the system. Luckily we were able to just switch over to the electric auto pilot. In the morning we noticed that our steering felt very stiff and we worried that our auto pilot wouldn't be able to handle it. We hand steered while simultaneously working to grease up the steering quadrant everywhere that we could think of.We briefly feared that we would have no self steering system and still. read more...

Snowmane - - Day 10

We are close to the mid way point of the crossing on miles. Hopefully we are past the mid point on days.The wind through the night was pretty strong, hitting into the 30s. We significantly reefed our double Genoas (our main has been 90% reefed since day 4). We were still hurtling along at pretty significant speeds, especially when surfing downthe big waves. We frequently hit 10 knots.Spirits are flagging a little with sleep being a bit hard to come by and the daunting distances both behind us and ahead of us. We have also been hearing some tough stories of what other boats are going through. Tomorrow we will do our half way dinner celebration. Not too long after that we will be counting down the miles to go at below 1000. We are having fun where we can find it. Yesterday we filmed our. read more...