It has been a lively morning’s sailing with winds close to 20 knots and a lumpier sea. We have furled and unfurled the sails a few times, as we feel she begins to get a little bit out of control, or go too fast. There has also been, relatively, more cloud. But we have bounced along, more than merrily, at over six knots, whilst also filling our batteries. The boat motion is still easy to live with. However, the wind direction has still been stubbornly in the sixty degrees and we need at least seventy to lay anything near our course.
Over the middle of the day things were very positive, and continued to be so over the afternoon. We completed the first quarter of our passage. At 1435 we had covered 553.4 nm and had 1653 nm to go. We’ve been going for just over four days. Both the sea state and wind had calmed, and the wind, although still swinging, was veering eastwards. By tea time we were averaging our correct course, charging along in 16 knots of breeze, over a cal ish sea, and beginning to reduce our cross track error. All was definitely good in our magical blue blue world. It is ours - we see a ship on AIS about every other day now, and have heard nothing on the radio for days. We are still with our new buddy, the ARC catamaran Qualia, on AIS not visually, who remains 10/15 miles away from us to the north.
Sadly though, through the hours of darkness (and it is dark as we have starlight only for most of the night and only the tiniest of moons for a short period), the wind backed north again and was around 15 knots. Once more we could not quite lay our course with this sail plan. We shall have to think carefully tomorrow.