40’39.5S 046’47.7W course 245′ speed 5.6
Early this morning the wind picked up… a light breeze filled in and cooled our cheeks.. so what did we do, we set sail of course! We still had a mizzen and forestaysail up, so we started with the jib. With Joana at the helm and Tim preparing coffee and tea for the next watch, Josu and I prepared the big jib on the starboard side. And as it was done.. I thought, why not set it straight away.. So Joana steered down wind, while Josu and I worked hard for 10 minutes, and the result was beautiful! And the look on Tims face even better, utter surprise that we did not call him!
At watch hand over we were able to set the mainsail and turn off the engine, which was perfect. At first we had the same speed as under engine, but soon we picked up some real speed and by the time we handed over the watch to Russell, we were doing 5,4 knots!
Karen dubbed this beautiful day a Sun-day. The sun was out, everybody was out on deck, shoes were off and almost everybody burned their face while sitting on the deck enjoying the beautiful sunny day. The wind was fresh, so the temperature difference between shade and sunshine was enormous! By lunch time the wind seemed so stable and nice, that we set the main topsail. Our first time this voyage to have a stable breeze, not too strong and not too many waves to rock us. And it felt really good! We worked hard, had to re-do a few steps, but when it went up, it went up very quickly! 6,5 knots!!!
The weather forecast had said 10 knots of wind and we did with it what we could… but during the night the wind started to back too much and so after dinner we had to take down sails. We are running late and when we are faster under engine, we really should start to make a little haste. So we are under engine now, heading to where we believe wind to start during our morning, so in a few hours. I can already feel a small breeze coming in on our starboard side and I hope it will fill in as quickly and as nicely as it did yesterday! That would mean we are under full sail, with topsail up before breakfast!
Other then that, we spotted at least 3 turtles today, two albatross kinds and a great shearwater has been flying around!
The night sky is amazing. Stars are filling the cloudless sky almost to water level. We can see the Milky way and the Magellanic cloud, the big one and the small one! A big bright planets light is reflecting in the water, its so bright and so dark outside!
All is well on board, Jet
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Beautiful descriptions, Jet — thank you so much for sharing these experiences with us landlubbers!