LinoCat

What are the options for tactics ? What are tools that can be used?Of course all start at the same time and place and have to reach the same place. So you can only vary the course, equipment and crew. Crew is fixed on most boats since the owners and some other people are sailing on them. This is different in the racing division. Equipment starts of course with the boat choice and since we all are in the cruising division we do not want to race in the first place but things like a spinnaker, a folding prop, new antifouling paint will influence your speed and so does the load of the boat. But often this is also already given. A folding or feathering prop will give you maybe 0,5 knots. But that is 12 miles per day which is 120 miles in 10 days. That means over almost 3 weeks arriving 1 or 2 days earlier! Routing and weather is one of the biggest things to consider. Some people directly target for St. Lucia while we for example went pretty much in direction of Cape Verde islands. But where...

We caught 2 big Mahi Mahi but one escaped. The other will become our dinner! 90cm long and so beautiful that we were also a bit sad to kill him.

From around 6 in the morning the wind picked up and we reached around 15knots in surfing down the waves. The autopilot had problems coping with that and we also started to think about taking the Parasailor down. Tucanon, a Lagoon 440 and Blonde Moment, a Hallberg Rassy 40 had their Parasailor down since yesterday evening. Blonde Moment was 12miles behind us yesterday evening and is now 53 miles behind. This shows how fast we were going. Now we have the genoa out and are doing 6knots. This is slow but comfortable. Less noise and less nerves used. The autopilot is running in the lowest setting also. Lets see if we can bring it up again tomorrow. Linocat has 1439 miles to go. Tomorrow we will reach half the distance to St. Lucia. Our position is 18°31,5N and 036°23.5W

After the 4th lure was "stolen" by some angry fish we decided to produce our own ones.Her is a rapid prototype consisting of parts of a coke can and a "Fruechte Freund" package wich is a kind of cereal bar.Then a double hook and an old metal nut from a toolset and up we go. We will keep you updated about any success :-)

Today is the first Advent as we would call this sunday in german. We light up the first candle of four before christmas. Usually this is also the beginning of having christmas cookies for the afternoon coffee or tea. So we also had coffee and cookies and a candle. But at 29 degrees this is much nicer than in 8 degrees and rain :-)

For all the Lani fans here a new picture from today. Grabbing for everything near her....

The bread is done and smelling great! Also our cruising speed is higher now and we had self made wraps with ham and tuna (not self caught) which was Yummy.Tonight it might be fish if we catch a Tuna or Spaghetti Carbonara. (If we catch some carbonara :-) )We are curious about todays position results for the catamarans.And by the way we also sailed more than 1000miles on this trip until today. The waves are higher now with around 2.5 to 3m coming from NE while we go west. So there is some surfing and slamming and the autopilot has to work hard. It is amazing to see how Lani can now stand and balance herself in these conditions.A true "seagirl".