Wednesday 17^th May 2023

North Atlantic Ocean 39^o 23.9N 24^o 49.0W 

Blog by David  (Time zone: BST -1)

We have had a favourable wind for about 24 hours. Sadly, at first,  it wasn’t really enough to drive us  so we motor sailed overnight to maintain progress at around 6 knots. At 06.00 this morning, the wind had veered a little to allow us to sail without the engine – which have have maintained broadly all today. 

The good news is that the following wind has allowed us to use less engine revs – and perhaps a third less fuel when the engine was running than I had feared – with the additional bonus not needing to motor today means that we have used less than 10% of our fuel to date.   

Our weatherguru has sent us on a northerly route –w e are more than 100 miles further north than we might have otherwise been – and from here we plan to sail due east for as long as we can before the winds veers round into the North east and strengthens overnight.  From midnight the wind will be pretty much NE and we will be sailing as close to the wind as is comfortable for the next few days.  We will struggle to pass close to Cape St Vincent (quite possibly we’ll pass 30+ miles south)  but now hope to have plenty fuel to motor into Gibraltar when we need to.

Life on board

We have quickly settled back into our watch routine – a rotating schedule  (three 4 hour watches in the day and four 3 hour at night) which means you do a different watch pattern each day.  Technically you can be  “On Watch”,  “Off- watch” or “On Standby” , there to help the watch leader if required. In practice though the Standby watch is usually your own time so that there is 6-8 hours between your watches, although the chap on the 20.00 – 23.00 watch cooks dinner (as Terry is doing as I type).   As a consequence, it is quite possible, as happened today, that you might not see soemone for several hours – Toby, for example!

To be fair  Toby has been working hard during our journey.  Up and down the mast several times, and when he wasn’t doing that he was busy mounting and riding the boom.

One can only speculate what he does there, but he does do it quite frequently

– as often as it’s conveniemt, it seems J