Gary's Deliveries

 Thursday 27th Nov '25 The day started nicely with a colour sunrise.  But, you should always take note of old sayings - "red sky in the morning sailors warning".  And how that was right today.  We have spent the past 2000nm's in really nice conditions and now we are nearing the end the weather has turned up to slap us in the face.  It was a sign of things to come..... It is now 21:00 and we have spent the day with little wind from behind to 30kts and a change of direct of 90 degrees within seconds.  The head sail has been in, out, in, double reefed, in, out.......... you get the idea.  You can see the squalls lined up around us on the radar, and when you look outside all you see is an angry sea and black clouds with lots of rain.  It's been like that all day.    If that wasn't enough the GPS has spent the day spitting it's dummy out and saying it has lost satellite  signal.  Autopilot defaults to "heading hold" and we loos...

Wednesday 26th Nov '25 Obviously by the day numbering system you will notice I have skipped a day.  Well there's only so much you can talk about when every day seems to be the same, that is until it isn't! You may have already noticed the photo - so we had some guesty winds this morning on Kel's watch which got up to the upper limit of "big red" so he called Richard (the next on watch) to help him take it down.  Which they did successfully.  Wind dropped back to normal 15-18kts range so after 20mins or so "big red" came back out to play.  That was about 06:00 and everything got back to normal.  I came up for my 10:00-14:00 watch and sat in the seat at the downstairs nav station playing games on my phone and we were sailing along nicely.  Kel went out into the forward cockpit to sun himself while he read a book.  After 10mins he called me and pointed up, I went out looked up and saw this -  NOT GOOD!   We had no gusts, no rolling, nothing unus...

 Monday 24th Nov '25 We finally got into the trade wind belt again and turned onto our final leg towards Martinique with only 500 and change nautical miles to go. Since leaving Cape Verde some 1,600nm ago we have averaged 7kts which is pretty good considering the lack of decent wind.  Unfortunately 90% of the time we have been motor sailing so a reasonable amount of fuel has been burnt.    The boys having our daily sundowner on the flybridge lounge Richard, myself and Kel  

 Sunday 23rd Nov '25 Not a lot to report today apart from no wind, wind, no wind, wind................ It's been one of those days.  We are still heading WSW trying to get to the wind band that is slightly lower than us.  Current time is 23:00 and we are still 81nm from the waypoint where we should pick up a decent trade wind and 1kt current in the direction we want to head so fingers crossed we find it.  At the moment the wind is ranging from 10-15kts where the trade wind should be 15-25kts.  Regardlless of if we find it or not we will be turning and heading towards Martinique at the waypoint and from that point it's only 600nm to go. Sorry for the very boring blog tonight but it's been a pretty boring day - which is always good as it means nothing has broken or needs fixing!

 Saturday 22nd Nov '25 Midnight on Saturday and 850nm to go....... Due to the wind dropping yesterday we had another look at the forecast which showed the wind is still further south from where we are so we changed course from W to WSW to try and pick up the trade winds again.   This seems to have worked.  As we are heading further south the wind has picked up nicely.  We have had a steady 15-20kts of wind for the past few hours but we will continue heading further down probably for the next day of so just to make sure before changing and heading back towards Martinique again. We have had the 2 headsails out for the majority of this trip but as you can see from the photo there's not a lot to see from the flybridge!  Its like sailing blind and if you stay up there while sailing wing on wing you have to rely on the instruments to "see" what's ahead so we spend 99% of our time on watch downstairs in the saloon where you have normal visibility.  We have al...

 Friday 21st Nov '25 I thought today would be another "ground hog day" but I was wrong - Started with the wind dying off to a sniffle and our speed dropping down to a sedate low 5kt range.  We have motor sailed most of the way across so have used up a reasonable amount of fuel so I am now monitoring how much we are using to make sure we don't run out before we get there.   For those interested in the numbers  - the boat comes with 2 fuel tanks of 600lts each and we have 31 x 20lt jerry cans so we had a total of 1,820lts of fuel, thast a lot for a sail boat!  Running 1 engine at a time at 1850rpm (5-6kts) we burn about 4lt per hour and the 17kw generator burns about the same but we only run that when we use the washing machine or water maker which is every 3 days using 15lts per wash/water making.  As of today we have about 200lts left in each tank and all the jerry cans are still full giving a total of around 1,000lts.  I always like to try and ca...