Position: 12°41.525N/51°56.638W, Sunday Dec. 4th, 16:40 UTC
Last night the wind changed... it was due East the whole trip but now it backed to South East – East, all the way to West... So we had to get the pole away for the genoa end ended up on a close reach course by this morning. Also there were a lot of dark clouds, not only in the South but also in the West and East. If you like clouds, the view was spectacular... otherwise it felt weird. On the grib files I downloaded there wasn't anything unusual, except from a not that deep a low just South of us. I guess this is just local and later in the morning the sky did partly clear.
Still, this morning we had our first serious rain since we left Scheveningen. It was actually more than in the brochure … :-) For the boat it was okay though, rinsing the salt from the lines and the sails and everything... and since I was steering, I had my first fresh water shower since 2 weeks... the others stayed inside and under the spray-hood... They prefer the foredeck salt water shower.. I suppose..
The wind is still West now, but too little to bring us any significant speed, so when we started the motor this morning to charge the batteries, I put it in forward instead of neutral and it still is...
Last night I also discovered that I'm running very low on minutes for my sat phone. I had a 500 minute card which should have been more than enough for the whole trip and back, but the mailasail program I use is crap. It takes at least 2 to 3 tries to get through to check mail and again to send mail, and that takes a lot of minutes. The options were to buy more – 50 – minutes or get a new simcard ….. yeah right, mid Atlantic... So I got some more minutes but we'll have to cut down on checking and sending emails. We need to get the grib files too :-)
Sending text messages is okay, they cost me no minutes and are free for the sender as well, if you send them via the iridium website. Elisabeth knows ! :-) Calling us is okay too, it's free for me but not for the caller :-o. Keep in mind though that our clock is back another hour today...
So to keep you all up to date, you'll have to do with my weblog-postings for now. In a couple of days, we'll have some decent internet access again, hopefully... to send mails, photos and stuff.
Distance left to go is less the 500nm !
