Well, we continue to have heavy seas of 10-12 feet and winds of 20-25 knots which some of you may be surprised to hear has slowed us down. You would think with heavy winds we would be moving swiftly, but it all depends on the angle you are sailing. When leaving Santa Maria we knew we would need to move east and north to get to our destination. We have been doing fine with moving east, but the moving north is what has been more difficult. With this in mind it was not a surprise to us that the total mileage for day 3 was only 57 miles! We are hopeful that we will get a change in the winds ahead so we can get a better angle and speed. Time will tell. One good benefit of all this wind is that our wind generators are working well and keeping our battery charged - always have to think of the positives!
We were surprised today after being out since Tuesday AM to see our first boat (other than the 2 that left with us). It was a large fishing boat that we called on the radio to see how the weather was ahead of us as he was coming from Europe. Unfortunately our Spanish isn't that good and his English wasn't that great but did talk for alittle while and it sounds like some better weather is ahead which matches up with what we have seen on our weather files. Once we finished this conversation, another sailboat called us just to say hi and tell us the same about the weather. He is about 15 miles ahead of us - nice to know others are out here and he said he'd stay in touch for the rest of the journey.
2 days ago our autopilot died so we moved over to our backup of the wind monitor which has been handling things well. Yesterday the wind monitor decided to break, but fortunately Bob was able to quickly fix it so it was back in business. Today Bob got the autopilot fixed so we have both systems functional. It sure is great to have a handy guy around to fix these things. He mentioned that he was very glad that he had installed these systems so he knows them quite well which helps with a quick diagnosis.
It is somewhat hard to project how long it will take us to get to our destination with the winds possibly (and hopefully) changing. With figuring at a worse case scenario we may have 6 more days of sailing ahead of us getting us to Portugal Oct 4th instead of Oct 1st. Time will tell. As of 4:30PM today we have 520 more miles to go.
Other than us having a longer trip than planned things are going fine. Sailor isn't quite as happy on this trip - we think she may be alittle seasick - she even came out back with us for some time today - she liked the fresh air, but not the movement. Guess she is like us in that regard.
Take care & will keep in touch - Bob & Janice (and Sailor too!)
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