Ocean Watches
Our fair and steady winds continue day-in and day-out. It truly is like coasting a bike down a huge, 7,000 NM mountain road. Today we tweaked the course a time or two, and we reefed the sails at sunset. Other than that, the day and night is ours to live as we please. The deck work is absolutely minimal and we’ve hardly even shipped a drop of seawater on board since leaving Cape Town 1,250 NM ago. My only complaint today was that there were a few clouds this afternoon reducing our solar charge on the batteries.
It looks like we will have good wind for the next 48-72 hours, and then generally dying down to light on our approach to St. Helena. If we do have to motor at all, we will use the engine time to run our semi-broken watermaker (for showers & dishes only now) and to top up batteries if the overcast continues. Our priority in St. Helena is to find a stainless steel welder to fix our Monitor hinge part (a weary theme this year) and fashion 2 shorter new rudder tubes from the broken ones we have on board. We’ll have over 5,000 NM of open ocean sailing ahead of us after leaving St. Helena and our self-steering is of critical importance!
Nep & I really like the way the days are passing–the watch schedule is very pleasant. Here is a 24-hr rundown:
0800-1400 Peter 1400-2000 Neptune 2000-0000 Peter 0000-0400 Neptune 0400-0800 Peter
(repeat above with Nep starting at 0800 the next day)
