The the promised drop in wind has come and, with it, a gradual decline in the sea state. The waves have gotten smaller and turned into more long rollers that rock you side to side instead of throwing you all over and up and down. This is good, but for one thing…the lack of wind.
We ARE a sailboat after all. From about 6:00am Sunday until 8:00am today we didn’t have the engine on. We ran the generator a bit to charge batteries, but other than that it was the sound of wind and waves. Today we had to fire up the “Iron Genoa” (Genoa being a name for the over-large sail in the front of the boat, though we often call it the Jenny or Genny for short) and start motoring. The motion isn’t as nice as sailing, though the waters are calmer and we’re not getting bounced so much as gently rolled.
We carry a decent amount of fuel. Not enough to motor from Virginia to Tortola, but we can run the engine for about 100 hours on our primary tank which is a range of about 7-800 miles. Our reserve tank can run us another 30 hours or so, which is up to another 200-250 miles. So we’re not concerned about fuel really since we should be through this cruddy no-wind zone in another day or so and hopefully picking up the Easterly trade winds to carry us the rest of the way. Such is the prediction, or hope anyway.
So we took some relaxing time today. Evicted the three flying fish that landed on board last night, did some fishing, reading, some took showers and cleaned up. We hooked into a really large Mahi-Mahi that ran off some line, then made one spectacular leap behind the boat and threw out the hook. The Mahi from earlier in the week we froze since it was too bumpy for us to want to cook it, so it’s cheeseburger pie casserole for dinner instead!
A quiet day, hopefully followed by a quiet night and day that will take us SSW towards longitude 64 west where hopefully we will pick up the trades! Arrival in Tortola on the 17th or 18th still looks reasonable.
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At 11/14/2012 21:58 (utc) our position was 26°21.60’N 068°07.80’W
