NoStress - Log Day 20 - The Wind Returns

Good news! The breeze built during the morning and is supposed to stay with us for the next two days at least. The crew were buoyed by this and work began on the day’s tasks.

Her with the name that cannot be mentioned (“Jennie”) was given her final bit of mechanical attention today (at least for a while we hope) and I think I can see visible relief on the faces of Nick & Des as I’m sure they’ve spent more time than they’d ever have liked to getting to know all of her foibles and just what makes her tick (or not as the case may be). Further inspection of the engine/gearbox teleflex controller points to a cable-fault as the reason why we can’t get any throttle when in reverse - it looks like there’s not much we can do whilst at sea. We’ll have to park carefully when we arrive at the dock in Saint Lucia.

Marking off our entries in the log book over the past two days we couldn’t help but notice some minor anomalies. Earlier in the trip we were sailing in a general direction and playing for favourable wind. Now we’re looking at our final destination and trying to sail to course. Interestingly the GPS display in the cockpit that displays our course over ground was not consistent with the plots in our log book. We should have been making very slight progress North, but we were actually still creeping South! We haven’t got to the root of the problem yet but with other instruments we’ve checked our course and can compensate for the erroneous display no problem. The paper charts and the plotter even made an appearance to double check our calculations and all looks good.

With the wind often comes the weather and after two days of sunshine the crew have dug their “oilys” out in preparation for the squalls we can see on the sunset’s horizon.

We enjoyed the last of our pre-cooked and vac-packed meals tonight so we’ll be scouring the larder for inspiration for tomorrow’s menu - pot noodle anyone?

As I write this most of the crew are in the cockpit (Jake is below watching Game of Thrones), sipping tea and chatting in the dusk’s gloom about life in general and, of course, the weather.

Until tomorrow - goodnight from the Atlantic,

Alex, Nick, Claire, Des, Paul, Jake, a few hundred flying fish, the odd petrel or two and half a dozen shooting stars...