Leg 2 Cape Verde – St Lucia. 6 days at sea

Mon Ami our Beneteau 57 is made for Atlantic Crossing, we can feel it when we surf down the big swell waves. The record surf downhill is now 15,5 knots!!!

With the sails crossed wing on wing on each side and the 25 knot wind coming 170 degrees from starboard we average 8,5-9,5 knots.

We passed many of the other boats the last days and we think we are in the top 20 of 75 boats. Some racers and catamarans are well ahead of us. We do see a 74 feet Catamaran sometimes on the AIS 20 Nm in front of us that could maybe be in reach. We are proud to keep almost the same speed.

We only had some small incidents.

Our kick-rod bracket has broken off from the boom. It should hold down the boom and stretch the mainsail when we are sailing down wind. We can manage without it.

Luckily, we noticed that two blocks on our main sheet was broken. Probably they got caught in each other and ripped apart when the main sheet stretches. Bjorn and I (Mats) had to pull out all of the 40 m long main sheet from the boom to change them.

Some of the highlight during a long passage like this is food. Louise have baked chocolate cake and Sara made Scones for breakfast. We are all happy that Sara and Bjorn volunteered to be responsible for games and surprises onboard. Every day there is some extra cake, cheese, salami, Saturday candies or even pancakes with Nutella!!!

This morning it was my turn to be the Net controller on the SSB radio. The job is to call all boats one by one to ask for their position and wind speed. Also to relay any emergencies from other boats and contact the ones without SSB radio on VHF. Some 25 boats of the 75 in the ARC+ fleet have SSB radio onboard. Today did 19 of them call in to the Net call this morning. Only 4 of them was ahead of us!

Today is movie day. Our Netflix downloads expires tomorrow, and Sara and Bjorn try to finish the Ozark series.

We download weather grib files from Predict Wind to Ipad via our Iridium Go Satellite device. It works fine and is very a professional app. This morning the forecast show weak winds in in the north part of the track to St Lucia. We decided to jibe and head more to the south. Our course is now 250 degrees. But it seems to be too late. The wind died out to only 8 knots and we do only 4.5 5 knots of speed. The rig slammers and is very noisy. Its irritating and we all hope the wind come back before the darkness. Its terrible to try to sleep in this rolly and noisy ship. We need more wind for our 30 tons heavy lady Mon Ami.

All well onboard Mon Ami

Position N 16 06 W 39 48, COG 245 sog 5 knots, DTW 1230 Nm to go of the 2100 Nm to Caribbean.