Oops!
Where Next?
Bob Williams
Sun 15 May 2016 00:31
Course: West Sou’ West Speed: 5 knots
Wind: East Sou’ East F3: gentle breeze
Sea: slight Swell: South East 1 meters
Weather: mostly sunny, mild
Day’s run: 137 nm
It seems Black Friday struck in a rather unexpected way, namely that I managed to post an email to my friend, Kate, to my blog in error. I thought to ignore it in the hope that no one would notice, and I hope that it has been removed by now, but I just want to apologise to my readers and especially to Kate for this lapse in concentration. I trust that my readers will be polite enough, if they have read it, to gloss over it and ignore its content.
In the meantime, we continue to make good progress. The wind is at that awkward angle when sailing our proper course where it is too far forward to effectively pole the genoa out and too far aft to allow the headsail to hold its wind in the shadow of the mainsail. So, what I have to do is to bear away from our desired course a little, pole the genoa out for a while, then drop the pole and come left to beam reach for several hours, thus zigzagging back and forth across our desired track. At the moment we are beam reaching and are south of our desired track. Later this afternoon I will pole the genoa out to run with the breeze on our port quarter and bring us slightly to the north of our desired track before repeating the process; that is of course as long as the breeze continues to blow from the east sou’ east.
Comparing our progress with when we were last here in 2011, we are now some 32 miles ENE of our noon position for the 10th of June. For that 24 hour period we had slightly weaker winds and made good 112 nm, so we are doing slightly better this time round.
All is well.