Monday, October 1, 2012

One Day Closer

It is Monday, October 1st which means that we have been "at sea" for a total of 5 days now. We had a good day yesterday with a total of 125 nm traveled. This is good news! We had heavy cloud cover with a few bits of blue sky and no rain so things are going well. We have been using "monty" (our wind vane monitor) and "otto" (our autopilot) for steering. It is sure nice to have them as extra crew members as we do not have to hand steer. The wind has been much steadier now running between 14-18 knots out of the north/north east. We are starting to see more large ships out here and have talked to a few of them. One that just passed us is headed to Turkey and came from Charleston SC. He wanted to know if we wanted him to adjust his course for us as he was close to us. We are always surprised when we see these large ships adjust for a 40 foot sailboat, but very glad that they do!

We figure that we have about 231 miles to go. If we can keep the pace that we have been for the last couple of days, we should be in Lagos, Portugal on Wednesday, October 3rd. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the winds stay with us and that will be the case.

Our friends, Kay and Dan are in Portugal right now on vacation and they fly back on Oct 9th so hope to catch up with them before they leave - it sure would be nice to get together with friends from home.

Our position as of 12:00 noon (UTC) is 37.18N, 12.52W with a hull speed of 5.5-6knots. Winds are running 14 knots and our heading is 108 degrees. Keep your fingers crossed for us that we can stay with 125 nm days so we can make port on Wednesday. It will be great to be able to sleep in our own bed again, cook a meal without strapping ourselves in at the stove and have a decent shower! We have gotten into the routine however and the days are flying by which is good. We are both getting some reading done and between naps during the day and our 4 hour on/4 hour off duty schedule the days blend into one another. At least trying to update this daily keeps us on track of what day it is!

Take care & will keep you posted.

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