Well, we are on our sixth day at sea now and are thouroughly in the passage making mode. St Martin and the Caribbean now seems a long way away though it is actually only about 510 miles as I write this. It will of course be 2500 miles away by the time anyone gets to read this.
Being at sea is very different from being in coastal waters if that doesn't seem too obvious. Shore based issues feel very remote but we still talk about them when we have our midday meal and general chit chat. The main issues are about where to go to find enough, but not too much wind. The daily plot on the chart at midday is the center of our life as it gives us an idea of how far we have come in a much more graphical way than the little boat icon on the chart plotter. I cannot imagine not using paper charts in conjunction with the plotter as some people do.
Night watches start by really dragging but now they seem to go quite quickly though we are exhausting our supply of radio plays which are our preferred means of entertainment for the night hours. Daytime is taken up with reading though I need to find more books for my Kindle!
This gave us a bit of a thrill, and a scare of course!
All in all, things are going quite well though we are still very much in the light wind area. We hope to get to more wind, and from the right direction in a couple of days though. A satellite phone conversation and a check of the tail end of our last GRIB file has however had the beneficial effect of suggesting a turn more to the east so the Azores are now much more dead ahead rather than being somewhere off to starboard while we make a lot of northing.
We had a hitchhiker for a night as well. Anyone able to identify what sort it is. We saw lots of them but do not know what sort of bird they are.
18 June
Well, we are now about 1500 hundred miles further on from where that last bit was written and are also safely moored in Porto do Lajes on the island of Flores. We have arrived in the Azores!
It turned out to be a very slow and rather frustrating passage the weather alternated with very light winds or very strong. At least it felt that way to us. We experienced two gales and two near gales though in general the wind was very light. Total time to cover 2300 miles was 26 days which works out at around 88 miles a day. We would normally expect to average 100 miles a day and often more than that. Somewhere along the way we managed to pick up a bit of rope round the propeller, we also contrived to run out of diesel for the engine which meant we couldn't motor the last bit into harbour and wound up accepting a tow into the anchorage outside the marina. Still, we are here now and very pleased to be so though it feels very cold to us!
The undoubted highlight, though rather alarming was to see a water spout. It was only two or three miles to the north of us in very calm weather. We hastily changed course to leave it to starboard but it quickly disappeared and then the cloud above it also disappeared! The landfall on Flores was also great. The sun was getting up around 0400 ships time and as I was looking ahead into the clouds, a couple of them looked too solid right down on the horizon. A check with the binoculars confirmed that they were indeed the islands themselves about 50 miles away. During Audrey's morning watch they were obscured by rain clouds for a while but those cleared and all through the afternoon, more and more detail became apparent until we were finally passing a mile off the southern tip and planning on how to sail into Lajes.
Without fuel, we used the dinghy to tow ourselves in to the tiny marina and are now savouring the delights of this beautiful island. Sadly, we are all cloudy and rainy today so there are not yet many pictures of this very beautiful island.
These were our first views of a truly lovely island!
1 comment:
Hurrah for your safe passage! Daisy thinks the bird is a blue footed booby, did it have blue feet?
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