Khaleesi - Log Day 13 - Neptune's little teaser!

Since the last blog, we had an intense but short squall pass over us at about 1700hrs on the 28th, and in its wake left no wind! Well only about 7 to 9 knots and from the West so it was directly behind us. I was determined to break the 200 nautical miles to go barrier, so we sailed at a saedate 3.5 knots until I had completed the SSB roll call, and we had our evening meal in relative peace and quiet. Over the next few hours we ran the engine up and motor sailed for an hour, turned off the engine and waited for an hour to see if the wind would "kick in". It never did of course. but then hortly before my watch at 2am on 29th, Graham called me up, as there was a squall coming towards us. Towering black clouds in an already dark sky were speeding towards us. We quickly reefed down and then the rain arrived. We had the auto pilot on, and went below where we tracked the rain clouds on the radar. Wonderful things these radars! At about 2:45am, the rain had passed and I detected a slight lift in the wind which had veered around to the North. I eased off on the throttle to check the true wind speed and sure enough it had built to a nice 10 knots and continued to build slowly. I came up to wind, got the main fully deployed then pulled out the genoa as we came back on course. The sky was unbelievably light for this time of the morning, but the seas were flat calm. Khaleesi revelled in her new found freedom, and we were soon speeding along at 6.5 knots with only 11 knots of wind. At that moment, with my yacht slicing through the water and with no lateral resistance from waves, I understood what it meant as a helmsman to be at one with your boat and nature. Such enjoyment. So we are are now speeding towards the Azores once more but Neptune's little teaser has left us about 6 hours behind where we wanted to be. The bars in Horta will just have to wait a bit longer for our business!
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Khaleesi at 5/29/2018 11:01 AM (utc) our position was 38°19.44'N 031°27.31'W