November 27th was a Big Day:
We put our clocks back one hour. We have our saloon clock on GMT and all other clocks on Local Time, with a note on the nav station bulkhead as to time differences. Cape Verde was GMT -1. Grenada is GMT-4. We want to continue linking our watch pattern to “night time”, so, before we left Mindelo, we calculated three one hour clock changes for the trip. The first was at 35 degrees longitude and took place today. Gave us a 25 hour day. Causing a complication in calculating 24 hour stats but the extra hour was very welcome. It’s almost a full time job sailing double handed, what with running the boat, sleeping and being on watch, that we are getting very little time to do our own things.
Clock back longitude was also bilge check longitude, along with the daily rig and deck checks. David found a dead flying fish on deck, nothing else amiss, and no water in any of the bilges. When checking the second auto pilot, on the steering quadrant, in Mindelo, ready for this trip, he eyed an egg cup full of water in the stern bilge. That was new. He’s been monitoring that and soaking it up with a cloth - not enough water to scoop out. A couple of days ago David tightened the compression nut on the stuffing around the rudder post and renewed the retaining wire. That seems to have done the trick and it’s completely dry now.
Today, most importantly, and joy of joys, the swinging wind eventually decided to continue its veer to the east, and stay there, all day. So we have been able to make our direct course! Thankfully. Throughout the day the wind has been relatively steady in direction, such that we could steer to a course and not the wind. We swapped autopilots to the old one to give the new one a rest. The wind dropped during the day and was a steady 12 knots over the afternoon. The sea state reduced too. The boat motion was lovely - like being in a slowly and gently swinging seat over the top of the blue ocean under the sun. The wind was averaging 083 degrees which kept us easily on course (269 degrees) and downwind rather than pushing the sail plan as we had been doing. But our speeed was slower and we are now seeing lots of sargassum weed in the water.
As night fell the wind increased to 17-19 knots and off we charged, noisily, through the water. We were literally roaring along in the pitch black under bright stars. I do miss the moonlight. Before midnight David had to reef to slow down to let a ship cross our bow. He saw another ship, further away this time, later in the night. Sadly the wind also went back more towards the north and for the latter part of the night we have been back to pointing up to a wind angle of 150 degrees, sailing on the wind setting on the auto pilot, and not quite making our correct course. Seems the winds are not as stable as they are supposed to be. But at least we now have the confidence that it can blow from the east. We don’t (yet!) feel too worried about it not going back there, as we had been worrying on days past.