Crossing Day 2 11/12/23

0300, time for my Watch. No change. Still crawling along in roughly a south westerly direction. The only thing of note was that we were using a lot of electricity to keep the meat frozen in the small fridge. We'll see how much we can make up in the sun during the daylight to come but I suspect we will have to abandon our attempt to keep the meat frozen.

Well before dawn we were completely becalmed and so at first light I got the sails in and motored south westwards at 3 knots in search of wind. Slowly a breeze began to fill in and after an hour we were sailing once again. I kept the engine running for another 30 minutes to get some more charge in the batteries. I also turned Starlink on to get an updated grib file. It took an hour to get online and the new grib was very similar to the previous one. The wind shadow cast by Sao Antao was shown in the same place as before, but clearly in reality it extended further eastwards than predicted by the grib.

We headed SSW for a few hours to clear the south east boundary of the wind shadow and then turned south west. We'll be able to turn a bit further westwards later, once we hopefully clear its southern extremity. 

We're moving steadily now, but only averaging about 4 knots (and are still on a detour to try and avoid more light winds ahead) and the trade winds are not looking particularly well established over the week ahead. Our chances of making Barbados by Christmas, therefore, are not great!

Mick cooked dinner - a chicken stew - very good too. I went off Watch at 1900 local time. I dozed and perhaps slept for brief periods but Bonny was going pretty well at 6+ knots (still heading south west to try and avoid light winds to our north west) and was rolling a fair bit and I was still not exhausted enough to sleep properly!