Marina check out is at 1200, so I got up early (7.45) filled the water tank and then did my washing on the pontoon. Meanwhile Mick continued his fight with Voxi (Vodafone) to get his voicemail back on line. He's spent many hours over the last week or so but today was a red letter day - he cracked it. Mind you the down side is he had no time left to do his washing!
We said our good byes to Lasse and Birgitte who now hope to depart for Surinam on Tuesday (as long as Birgette doesn't catch Covid from Lasse). A little later - about 1230 - they sounded their fog horns as we passed by on our way to the anchorage where we needed to spend some time to set up Bonny's rig for the down wind sailing we were expecting for our Atlantic crossing.
That took a few hours. We had briefly used the 'twin' headsails and two poles when sailing around the corner of northern Spain and it took us a while to figure out where and through what and which side of this and that all the various bits of string should go. At last, come 1500 local time, 1600 GMT, we had the poles set up and it was time for a spot of lunch. We finally got the anchor up at 1530 local time and motored out of the harbour. Once out we sailed slowly north west under just the jib to get a decent offing and then turned south west and set both headsails on the poles with the wind more or less behind us.
Our plan was to sail roughly south west to avoid the wind shadow to the south west of Sao Antao and for 3 hours we slipped along nicely at 4-5 knots. Then at around 1900 local time just as Mick went to grab a couple of hours sleep the wind started to die. I headed the boat further south in an effort to find more wind but to no avail. Our grib forecast was way out. The wind shadow was either much bigger than it predicted or it was in a different place. Either way short of motoring there was not much we could do other than carry on crawling along. Eventually we would find wind.
I went off watch at 2100 local time.
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