Time: 9 dec 19.30
Position: 13:58.46N 59:35.25W
Speed: 9 knots
Distance sailed: 2610 NM
Weather: ENE guessing windspeed 17-20 knots, beautiful night!
I was told today that I have missed out on giving our position in the blog
so I guess that on the blog’s map we haven’t moved much.
So for our last blog on our way to St Lucia – these last 24h have been
heavenlike! This morning the wind took more speed just before sunrise. I could
hear the guys in the cockpit shouting “wouahhhhh we are surfing at 16,4
knots!!!!” with Johan stearing. Johan has actually always been the lucky one to
manage to stear during the speed toppings?... The rest of the day the wind
has been stable at around 12-15 knots and spinacker 3 has shown to be more
tenance than we thought it would be.
Every morning after breakfast comes the longing mails from our friends who
are following us, giving us valuable reports. Thankyou to Helén (Olof’s
wife), Mado, Freddy, Lotta&Christer (Louise’s family) and Håkan (friend to
the Wennbergs)! Your cheering reports have been so valuable and joyful! This
morning’s report gave us extra competition taste and the competition horns have
really grown out on all of us. However we are most happy that our strategy taken
5-6 days ago has so far shown to be a winning concept.
A few days ago we saw the gribfiles telling us that in a few days there
would be a weather change north of rumbline (the straightest way to goal) before
St Lucia giving us bad winds. We interpreted it as pretty bad and we didn’t want
to end up stuck on a parking lot in the Atlantic. So our eminent navigator Olof
took the strategic decision that we should leave rumbline and “dive” more
southwards although this meant a detour of 50 extra NM. We moved our course
South - South West like an arch which we predicted would give us more favourable
winds when the wind change would come according to the weather forecast. We
actually sailed in the wrong direction for 4 days and yesterday it paid
off. The wind changed to East giving us the best wind angle in straight
direction towards St Lucia – now in full spinacker at around 18 knots.
Last night we managed to take in on a few boats and now we are working on taking
in more boats before crossing the arrival line at Pigeon Island on our way to
Rodney Bay in St Lucia.
The day has been just like we’ve all been longing for. Steady winds &
small waves = little roling in the boat. Beautiful weather and everyone took
their time reading a book, sitting on deck relaxing, playing cards with the kids
in the cockpit, having both lunch and dinner with the table up in the cockpit,
enjoying time together as well as taking time for ourselves – in other words a
really lovely and relaxing day on the sailing boat. We even got the priviledge
to taste our home made yoghurt (thankyou Clare for your tip, it was easy!) and
home made bread for breakfast (the Spanish self raising flour didn’t really work
out, but it tasted good ). And on time for
the sundowner we celebrated “only 100 NM to go” for St Lucia with some
cava.
The last day with the ARC on the Atlantic is forever printed in our minds
as one of the most memorable one!
Now according to our ETA (estimated time of arrival) we have less
than 12 hours to go before we arrive in St Lucia.
See you tomorrow for some rumpunch!