Hello Everyone,
Well, it is now obvious we are moving towards winter (or shall I say early spring). It is getting quite cool out in the cockpit at night and this morning it was very cloudy again. The cloud does seem to burn off through the day though and we are not getting those lovely tropical rainstorms that washed the salt off the boat. Today the swell is very big (about 4m) but because the waves are far apart, we ride up and down them very nicely without slamming into them too often. We are still motor sailing north-east and are hoping for the predicted wind direction change tomorrow which will enable us to go north under sail alone. Unfortunately we seem to be just behind the weather pattern we need and never seem to catch up! We are now level with Western Sahara to the east and Key West, Florida to the West. (Hello all my lovely family and friends in Florida, we are just 3,155nm from you!) Things are going smoothly with no breakages so far on this leg although our gennoa (big white sail in the front) has seen better days and may not last till we get to Lisbon as we were hoping. When we get to Madeira, we will have another repair done and we will see....
Our most useful member of the crew, our autopilot, continues to work unfailingly. I have named him "Kanenas" (meaning "Nobody" in Greek, the name Ulysses gave himself, I think when escaping from the Cyclops). He just works quietly in the background, day and night. Without him, one of us would have to be steering at all times, putting a huge stress on the rest of the crew. Our rudder stock has developed a "creak" so hopefully we don't have problems with it. We will give it a good greasing when we get to Madeira. That's all for now folks. Keep well and fair winds.
Arti & Dimitri
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