Groundhog Day!

Day 18.7 15N 17W

Groundhog day here with another 24 hours of sailing at 130 True Wind Angle in 12 to 15 knots of wind, flat seas, only a few minor rain showers each dawn.. After the doldrums its looking like strong upwind tradewinds so am enjoying waking up to this same song on the radio every morning..(you had to see the movie)…

Full main, medium gennaker..Foil down, foil up, foil down as the wind sends the boatspeed above or below 22 knots and we need or don’t need the extra lift in the leeward hull from the curved foil.  These curved foils make such a difference, the leeward hull is never buried in the water, in fact, the faster you go, the higher it rides. The boat is also much easier to steer as you usually lift some daggerboard at the same time (though in our case right now, there is only 30 cm of daggerboard that we can lift due to the collision).

Even though we have been sailing parallel to the coast of Brasil for 3 days at 20 knots plus, we still have another 3 days to go to get to its top - an enormous country. Overlaying Brasil on to Africa to the East, it would cover from South Africa to Liberia..Right behind the galley bench is  a large map of the world, and I have been plotting our position on it each day, and these are the sort of things you notice when you have some time on your hands..

The visibility here is incredible, yesterday afternoon we were seeing the tops of large cumulus clouds that must have been well over 60 miles away, and they looked like snowcapped volcanoes.

More later

Brian