Saturday morning 6th June
Catmojo
Matt
Sat 6 Jun 2020 12:57
We turned east early when Simon Said yesterday, and eventually (under the supervision of the Fuel Politie) I changed the autopilot to "performance" mode and forced the boat to hold a pinchy 41 degrees off the wind, so we sailed all evening actually heading (slowly) towards Lanzarote again. But we see better winds ahead next week.
Full moon and a dramatic card game with 4-way Set Point on the very last game, then a bit of motoring overnight in falling winds. Apparently some ships were seen almost colliding a way off (but they didn't, as usual) and all was fine.
Boaty types often talk about going "towards" their destination, rather than going "to" a destination, perhaps to avoid annoying the Wind Gods, or Neptune, or due to their own propensity for dithering and changing routes. We're still keen to sail as much as possible but wind coming straight from the waypoint makes it awkward, and slow. And we're still going towards Lanzarote, most (but not all) of the time.
The wind picked up this morning with a little more north, so I dragged out the foresail and had a few hours of good sailing almost directly towards Lanzarote. But then the wind changed against us, again. Anna got up and we tacked to go northwards instead, but we can only make NW. This took the boat exactly parallel to our waypoint at 32N 35W which for ten minutes stayed exactly 495.55nm away. Hum, it was better on the other tack after all, so we went back, again doing the wearing around thing - falling away from the wind and turning all the way around to the new course.
The chartplotter shows our track as a purple line and after this bit of messing around our track looked like the first bit of a capital letter "M". Oho! So, of course (geddit?) Anna and I spent the next hour writing "Mojo" with our track, about three miles long, in the middle of the Atlantic. Of all the silly things I've done on a boat, this is about in the middle.