Dec 6 - 17th Day at Sea
All is well. We are 794 miles from St Lucia, and Las Palmas is 1,905 miles behind us.
We had 8-12 knot winds from aft for 20 hours, and four hours ago it increased to 11-14 knots, still from aft. The higher wind allowed us to sail at 5-5.5 knots, which helped by a favorable swell makes our speed 6-6.5 knots. Course is about 277 and we are only able to make 255-265, which means gibing once a day. At this rate we will be arriving in St Lucia the morning of the 13th.
Waves are fairly moderate and there are a few scattered clouds, but sailing at night, steering at Orion, is still beautiful. There are no storms forecasted.
We caught two fishes today, number 5th and 6th. A Wahoo and a Mahi. We estimate the Wahoo to be over 3 feet (1 m). We could actually measure it properly but it may come smaller, so 3 feet it is! We will make Wahoo paella with it (Paella de Wahoo in Spanish).
Today we took a crew picture and emailed it to our families, using XGate through the iridium satellite. The XGate software compressed it from 2 Meg to 7K, I got the feeling that all they will be able to see will be a blur, but it's nonetheless an amazing technology. Satellite email is extremely slow, slower that the old dial in connections from the 90s, and sending and receiving emails is an exercise in patience.