Day 7, Falkland Islands to St Helena

1030Z 22MAR22, Day 7, Falkland Islands to St Helena. A full week at sea completed. Yesterday was a nice, easy day. The winds calmed to almost nothing and the engine came on. The weather was overcast and then became sunny. We warmed up and dried out the boat a good bit with the engine heater running.

Current Position: 43 31S / 039 37W
24 hour progress: 123nm, 5.1kts avg SOG, 17.2h of engine time. Approximately 2,384nm to go on the great circle route to St Helena. Week 1 stats: with 956nm actually sailed, we have knocked off about 865nm of the great circle course and run the engine for 19.8h.

We started yesterday continuing to sail in light winds. When the winds fell below 10kts and our speed dropped below 3kts, the engine came on. While we don't enjoy the noise, we did enjoy the relatively flat boat, took showers and did some house keeping chores.

We had been watching this hole in the wind since departing. We were hoping that it would line up with the 22nd as that is Megan's birthday. Alas it arrived on the 21st (which always seemed the most likely). So, we had a bit of an early birthday celebration. Daxton made some chocolate, coffee treats. We had a nice lunch and delicious dinner - shrimp, garlic, broccoli and pasta. The boys stood their watches and Megan got reading time and 4+ hours of uninterrupted sleep.

We motored through the night and in the morning we were able to roll out the genoa again and secure the engine. We are closing out day 7, close reaching, on a port tack, 1 reef in the main and full genoa in light winds and calm seas with an easterly course. After 5 days of a starboard tack everything will now be shifting from port to starboard.

We expect the next sailing to be more towards Tristán da Cunha and not directly along the great circle. We will see how the winds and seas develop. We hope to be able to sail east without (much) south, though we expect to need to take the south for comfort as winds and seas increase again. We expect we will be sailing to windward for a while.

In our bird update, the number of birds continues to decrease. There are still some birds - prions, petrels and albatrosses - and even occasional large packs of prions. Our resident bird expert and fishing enthusiast (ie Daxton) will surely be worried that the fishing is no longer good if / when the birds are gone. Though maybe that makes it easier to avoid putting in the line?