Day 4, Atlantic Crossing

1230Z 21DEC18, Day 4, Atlantic Crossing. The winds settled a bit yesterday afternoon but have come back up some. We continue to sail a broad reach with 2 reefs in the main and full jib. We continue to watch the weather and are analyzing when to turn west again. We have been making a course over ground between 200-230T.

Current Position: 20 47.2N 023 33.4W
24 hour progress: 160nm, 6.7kts avg SOG, 638nm total progress, approximately 2120nm to go along the great circle route from our current position to the Caribbean (but we are still pushing south which ultimately adds miles but keeps us in better wind). Weather continues to be warm and sunny with the temperature slowly rising, yesterday afternoon we started seeing some clouds in the skies and today we have high wispy clouds.

The sea state has been variable, calming when the winds are calmer and a little larger swell when the winds are a bit higher. It is still comfortable enough and we managed to clean the kitchen at a relatively more gentle time yesterday. Cooking dinner was again a full contact sport. We still expect to continue in similar conditions for a couple of days and then have a bit of slower progress just before and around Christmas.

We continue to make good time and are all doing fine. Our refrigerator is acting up - Jon worked on it some this morning and perhaps it is starting to work properly again. We are considering whether we should go to the Cape Verdes as the winds are pushing us close anyway. The question is whether we can fix it there or just triage it, like Jon is already doing aboard. For now we continue to use it as a large cooler, limit opening it, and hope our fresh meat that was solidly frozen continues to last. If/when it goes, we still have plenty of food - but we will be on potatoes, pastas and rice dishes with canned meat (tuna and chicken), and any fresh fish we may catch. Perfectly liveable but annoying. Unfortunately this refrigerator unit has been an issue and source of continued frustrations for different reasons over our 15 months onboard. Life on a boat!