Adventures on our Trintella 57a…
To sum up day’s 1,2 and 3 we have been navigating to wind on a close reach resulting in courses of 020, 040 and more recently 000. With so much north in our course we close the Azores by about 15 or 20 miles a day. The boat loves close reaching. Initially we were in the trades and stonking along at 7.5kn but more recently we have been gliding at about 3.5 to 6kn on a flat blue sea under clear skies in about 10kn wind with a small swell. Below it’s 34 deg C in the day but cooler
Well I don’t know what’s happened to the blog meister. Too much sleep I think! So, for the avid blog readers out there I thought I’d share what I wrote to our shore support crew for day 2. We had another good day, better than the first. The sea has smoothed and the wind keeps getting some south into it so we are bending towards the Azores beautifully. Just call the boat ‘Bend it like Beckham’! The report we send in to Pangolin includes the speed and course plus wind direction and speed etc if you are interested. We had
It’s Friday and we should be gone. Large lizards, bigger than the ship’s cat are in the way. Well, we blame the lizards. But perhaps the fact that the last morning out-bridge was at 10.30am and we have yet to get fuel, had to check out of customs and do a bit more provisioning may have had a bearing on the departure plan. Last thing to do is get about 350 litres of fuel to take it up to our full 2 tonne capacity. Booked in at 3pm but it’s gusting up to F6 pinning us to the dock. We
Just like being back home, if your from the States, or a glimpse into the future if your from the UK – small malls lining the streets with roadhouse restaurants:
Testing our ability to email the blog on our SSB radio.
So many filters changed, oils, impellors, belts – we expect to go through the calm Horse Latitudes and won’t see much wind on the way to the Azores. So it will be a NE reach, motoring, then picking up the Westerlies to the north. With a little under 2000nm motoring range we could burn fuel to get there but that would make for a horrible journey. The time to put to sea is just around the corner. We have vacu-packed and frozen meats, bought a ton of food (simple to cook this time!) and will soon take on fuel and
The Beneteau 40 yacht Cheeki Rafiki has probably been abandoned some 620 miles east of Cape Cod. This is an ARC 2013 yacht and will be well equipped. The crew will be well trained. They will take ditch bags into the liferaft. We were trained in Sea Survival by military trainers and we are sure they will have endured the same. The crew set off locator beacons and their location was recorded. A cargo ship appears to have photographed the hull, upturned, the keel gone. The weather in the area was poor. The loss of Cheeki Rafiki and her four
Here we are looking for hydraulic bits and pieces in the odd bucket whilst tons of the stuff goes straight over our heads…now all I need is a stepladder!
Get your camera airborne near the runway threshold…these are our going to be amongst our last photos of the Caribbean seaside. Everything is getting so much easier; there’s nobody here! But even with our addition of a 6,000 BTU air conditioner in the companionway we are still hitting 32 deg C in the saloon. Ha! Last night we thought it was getting a bit chilly as the airco got us down to a low of 28. We had a quick peek inside the airport to see how the majority travelled – at 440 knots!
We were very well cared for by the guys at FKG. It’s a very professional rig shop and not only are they seriously tooled up, backed by loads of supplies from metal stock through to hydraulic parts, they are also knowledgeable and efficient. Our furler came straight from stock and was fitted in the space of a day and a half. The bill followed about 10 minutes after completion, on a Saturday, completing the job.