Charm - Day 9- wind!

See what being thankful gets you? Wind at the perfect angle! After several days of chasing he wind around and one painful day of going away from the objective to position ourselves for future wind, we are in the right place to receive the wind.

There are so many ways to track speed on a boat - I know of at least 4 - speed over ground (SOG), GPS speed, knots measured by the device in the water, and VMG. Of these, I think VMG is the most helpful right now. It is the amount of our speed that is actually getting us towards our destination (the Good part).

When we were diving south, I think our 24-hour VMG was 2.7. Right now, it's 8. It has been as high as 10. This means that (Yay - just saw 10 again) all of our efforts are actually moving us directly towards St. Lucia. It's rather demoralizing to sail away from your goal but we think the dive south paid off. Who knows?

In other news, the yellow spinnaker went up for a day or so, then started to fall apart at the site of the repair so we took it down and re-repaired it, then sent it up again but it failed in the same spot.

I may take out needle and thread tomorrow but right now our solid rainbow chute is doing quite well for us. And it's pretty.