Day 19 Canaries-Martinique

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 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 loose all other info like course, speed, distance and time to next waypoint.  We can either reboot to whole boat's electrical system and it comes back on straight away but it takes a few minutes to reconfigure everything and you have to have someone hand steer until the Autopilot kicks back into action or wait 20mins for it to have a toilet break and a cuppa before coming back to life.

Always a good idea to have a walk around the deck in the morning to check to see how many of these flying fish have misjudged their route though the night and left a stinky oily mess.  

                                                                      Little buggers


We have now slowed down as we don't want to be arriving into Le Marine harbour in the dark so we will be spending a few hours going round in circles until day break before heading in.

We are on track to be tied up along side the fuelling pontoon about 07:00 or 08:00 tomorrow - 20 days and 2200nm from the Canaries but I got on in Rome with my sone Declan who came with me to Malaga (great to spend some quality time with the young fella) and the total distance I have travelled on this boat is around 3,000nm or 5,550km.  

Getting off the boat on Friday, going to spend a few days here in Martinique then get a ferry to Saint Lucia (1hr 30m away), spend a few days there then start the 48hr journey home next week.

Time for a break.............see you on the next one 





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