Day 2, Falkland Islands to St Helena

1030Z 17MAR22, Day 2, Falkland Islands to St Helena. Yesterday was sunny all day. It warmed up the pilot house almost too well and we vented out the door a couple of times. We had thought about opening the pilot house roof but a couple of large waves rolling across the deck convinced us the door was a safer, drier option. We had another nice sunset and the brilliant moon off of our bow right after sunset kept us company again.

Current Position: 49 22S / 051 34W
24 hour progress: 130nm, 5.4kts avg SOG. Overall progress for the passage is 287nm, approximately 2986nm to go on the great circle route to St Helena.

We are sailing a beam reach and making nice average speeds - other than when the wind died as it shifted last night. The main has 3 reefs in and we are sailing the full genoa. The winds and seas have calmed quite a bit.

Yesterday saw a couple of random milestones. Zephyros ticked through 26,000nm on her GPS odometer at 1:37pm. We also passed north of 50deg South just before 7:30pm. We are now in the Roaring Forties. Theoretically, it should be a little calmer than the Screaming Fifties, but we'll reserve judgement until we've transited them in open ocean. It isn't exactly warm yet, but significantly warmer than the Antarctic waters and those of the Southern Ocean.

We changed from a port tack to a starboard tack around midnight. We followed the wind around and tacked. It was a bit of a messy affair as we only had about 10kts of wind. We ended up turning on the engine briefly to force the turn since Zephyros didn't have enough speed to make the turn after we pulled in sails to control the gybe. Once we were all sorted the engine was back off and we were slowly sailing again in light winds.

As the winds have filled back in we are staying on a beam reach and heading north of rhumb line. This should allow us to stay in the winds and fall off a bit to head towards Tristán da Cunha. At least that's the plan from looking at the weather forecasts.

All is well on board. We are leaning the other way now with things repositioning themselves from starboard to port. We are continuing to settle in. Daxton stood some watch last night. Everyone seems to be finding their sea legs. There continue to be lots of birds - albatrosses, petrels and prions. Daxton is our bird expert and enjoys identifying them and learning about them.

We do seem to have a small, annoying problem with our inverter that we will be trying to figure out. It started not turning on at the switch before we arrived to Stanley. We had a gentleman come over to look at it and update the firmware, but we couldn't figure out what was wrong and he found that others have reported a similar undiagnosed issue. At that point we had been able to cycle power at the box and it would come back on at the normal switch. That seems to have stopped working consistently now. We did have it on to recharge the computer for a short period. We will see if we can get it working again. In the meantime it is an annoyance and a challenge to be solved with under slept brains. If we can't charge the computer we can manage without it. We have iPads that we can use for the necessary tasks underway and those charge on 12v chargers. There are only a limited number of things that we turn the inverter on to do and we can manage comfortably without them. In the meantime it is a puzzle to consider.