Day 21, Falkland Islands to St Helena

1030Z 05APR22, Day 21, Falkland Islands to St Helena. 3 weeks at sea! Yesterday the weather was sunny for a while in the morning and then was mostly gray with high clouds for the rest of the day. Air and sea temperatures are very pleasant - 77F/25C and 72F/22C respectively - making us all quite warm.

Current Position: 28 30S / 015 19W
24 hour progress: 129nm, 5.4kts avg SOG. Overall progress for the passage is 2,734nm, approximately 915nm left to go via a great circle route to St Helena. Week 3 stats: 923nm actually sailed in the week which knocked off about 847nm of the great circle course. We ran the engine for 16h.

We made good progress again yesterday. Our course stayed pretty close to rhumb line for more of the day than expected. We are now heading north which is the best we can do with easterly winds. It looks like the next few days have the wind coming more or less from where we want to go. So we will have to figure out how to try to keep making forward progress with whatever we get. The forecasts also show that we are likely to have 20kts of wind or less for the rest of the trip. So at least the headwinds aren't too strong.

We sailed the whole 24 hours about as tight to the wind as we could go (again). We started the day with 3 reefs in the main and 2 in the genoa. As the day went on the winds lightened and we shook out reefs gradually. We now have only 1 reef left in the main and a full genoa. The winds lightening meant that we didn't sail quite as hard, and we are all feeling a little less worn out this morning.

After sailing for 3 weeks with the wind and waves often forward of the beam, the boat is now encrusted with a layer of salt. This has been amplified by the decreasing rain and increasing temperatures. The outside of the boat is now a salt lick, and your hands are covered in salt whenever you go out to work on deck. Anyone interested in forming the Roaring Forties Salt Company? Instead of selling sea salt by vintage year, we could sell it by the latitude at which it was collected. Probably not the most profitable way to use a tanker ship. Oh well, it works for our pasta.

We are all starting to think about landfall even though it is still more than a week away. Just another thing to ponder with one's time at sea.

Bird numbers are still low, mostly just the petrels again yesterday.