Day 12 – Life is good

And it just keeps getting better.  The last 4 days have seen the weather and seas get progressively better and better.  Yesterday was fabulous with perfect winds, broad reaching with the gennaker at 8 knots, sunny skies, and comfortable temps.  We flew the gennaker until later afternoon when the breeze got up into the low 20’s, furled it, and set the whisker pole to fly the genoa wing on wing.  We spent all night like that cruising straight down the waves.  Not a bad way to roll.  We had our lowest electrical consumption yesterday of only 52 amp-hours, thanks to the easier sea state and plenty of sun.  Today has started off even better with the same wind and sun, but the sea state continues to improve.  Right now the boat moves along really smooth and we are heading straight for the Azores.

It has taken 10 or 11 days but we are finally getting into the rhythm of the ocean.  Neither of us ever got seasick, which is a bit of a surprise given our lack of time on the water recently and the seas, but we weren’t very comfortable a lot of the time either.  Until yesterday, or maybe the day before.  Now it feels like we are in a special place and this is the reason we endure the discomforts at other times, to get to experience times like this.  They say nothing worth doing is easy.  I don’t know if that is true, but it seems to be true for crossing an ocean in a sailboat.

We saw our first ship in 7 days this morning.    It was several miles to the north, probably headed to the English Channel.

The clouds this morning were really interesting.  (Man, we spend a lot of time looking at the clouds.  Mostly wondering what evil they might bring, but sometimes just admiring them.)  It was a bit of a mackerel sky, but the clouds looked almost like a wet spiders web.  We’ve never seen anything like it.  We took some pictures, so hopefully they will turn out.

There is no doubt we are moving eastward.  We’ve haven’t changed our clocks since leaving Annapolis as that simplifies our watch schedule, but it starts to get light now before 3am and the sun set around 6:30pm last night.

We seem to have enough food onboard to make two more crossings, but of all things, we have run out of cereal.  I have filed a complaint with the captain and asked for a first class upgrade on a future voyage.

Current position -40 39.63n 41 31.54w
Distance to go – 605 nm
24 hour run – 158 nm