Current Position: 39 54S / 025 25W
24 hour progress: 119nm, 5kts avg SOG. Overall progress for the passage is 1,811nm, approximately 1,762nm left to go via a great circle route to St Helena. Week 2 stats: 855nm actually sailed in the week which knocked off about 623nm of the great circle course. We ran the engine for 7.8h.
Yesterday was another slow progress day to close out a slow progress week. We are closing in on half way there, but by great circle progress it is at least another day away. That is in line with our thoughts that the passage would be about a month so while we might like to have made better progress, it is still good progress.
We sailed the first 14 hours or so of the day with 3 reefs in the main and a full stay sail. We bounced and bashed along eastward waiting for the winds to move to the north and to settle down. We ended up waiting longer than expected for both. However, after dinner and night fall the winds did (after a last round of strong gusts), eventually, calm and turn. It was a fitting final roar as we were finally released to sail NE out of the Roaring Forties and above the 40 degree line of latitude.
And in the spirit of everything happening at once, in the very dark night, while the winds were howling and thinking about turning, we got our first AIS hit since losing contact with Kelper back on Day 1. It was a refrigerator ship headed to the Falklands to pick up some squid. He passed well north of us and was only on our AIS for about 2 hours. But it was something new and generated some interest as we would turn towards him if the winds turned. (Note: we were still going rather slow at 4kts to his 15kts and it wouldn't have been any issue, just would have made us pass closer than the significant separation that we had.) In the end, at 8nm away, we never even saw his lights in the waves and rain.
A short while later, we were able to stop bashing, roll back in the stay sail and set the genoa, gradually rolling the full genoa out and moving from a close reach to a beam reach and then eventually to a broad reach. Once the winds moved they just kept moving until they were from the west. They also gradually lightened throughout that turn.
It looks like we will spend the next few days searching for sailable wind in another high pressure area. At least highs generally mean nice weather! We will see what we get.
In yesterday's bird watching, we had very few visitors. They all seemed to disperse or head off to the higher pressure areas to get out of the very blah weather.
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