Bluewaft Log Day 21
Saturday 10 December 2016
18°14’.133N 057°21’.267W
We now have just over 300nm to go – so in the home stretch now. We’ve had
a good 24 hours of sailing, averaging over 7kts on goose-wing with the jib
and gennaker with wind speeds in the 10-16kt range. A comfortable ride
with the swell giving us a nice ‘push’ in the right direction. We clocked
a top speed of 9.4kts – not bad for this sail configuration in these winds.
We’ve decided to sail straight to St Maarten (270nm NNE from St Lucia).
The island is French and Dutch – sort of a mini Belgium in the Caribbean.
We have arranged a berth for Bluewaft there with the local Lagoon agent.
Marcus and Alex have changed their flights and James and I should still be
able to make our planned flights back to New Zealand and Oz. This way we
should have a couple of days to get everything ‘ship shape’ on Bluewaft and
have a bit of a break before we leave. Unfortunately we’ll miss St Lucia
and the warm welcome there, but with our time constraints I don’t think
that practically there is any other option.
Yesterday we had another catch – a Mahi Mahi on Marcus’s line. We also had
a visitor who flew in just as we were BBQing dinner. James managed to
catch him in his hands and release him back to the blue.
For lunch we did sushi with the remainder of the SkipJack tuna. I did some
more ‘spicy’ variations that seemed to go down well. For dinner we did
Poisson Cru and BBQ steak. In general the provisioning has worked out
well. We’ll still have some left over frozen food, but the fresh food has
lasted pretty well. Unfortunately Alex’s experiment with the alfalfa
didn’t pan out. It went from being green and ‘bushy’ to ‘flat as a tack’
in 24 hours. So more work on this required. The rest of the herbs have
lasted well.
So everyone is now looking forward to arriving. At our current speed we
should be there by Monday morning (48 hours from now). Looking forward to
that first cocktail on shore!
Happy sails
P1000994