LinoCat

Here you can see where we are now.

And we are running out of lures! A really big one now even stole our modified lure. We have exchanged the thin pre-line against a 80lbs one. But he was a good fighter and within 20 minutes he bit through the line. We need steel pre-lines for the Atlantic! Also we are running out of soft drinks tonight but there are around 10 beers left :-) Tomorrow i get the trans atlantic hair cut and it is also shower day. We might not be able to make it for the 9th since at night we bring the Parasailor down if there are to many rain clouds on the radar. Then it would be the 10th early in the morning. But so what... We will get our rum punch form sure!

We just hit the 500NM mark. But due to dark clouds we have decided to take the Parasailor down overnight and use the Genoa only. This will cost us approx. 2 knots of speed but is much easier to handle if we get caught by a squall (small thunderstorm cell). We had Spaghetti Bolognese tonight and cucumber salad. Very good! We filled both Diesel canister today in the main tank to get rid of the canisters on deck. Now they are lying empty in the Dinghy. It was nice to fill them during the atlantic swell. But we manage to fill most of it in the tank :-)

Just another 570nmm so it looks like we will arrive St.Lucia on thursday at around noontime!

Hi, only 577NM to go from now on. Tonight we brought the Parasailor down for a while since dark clouds were all over the radar screen. Up to seven at the same time around us. Once the first few have passed you and only rained a few drops you tend to loose respect for squalls. So we try to be as safe as possible but this will cost us speed. Since we have the little one on board we should try to be on the safe side always (and of course try to be fast). The wind is often changing directions and the waves coming from two different angles also move the boat around therefore we often have to adjust the sail. The weather forecast from the ARC Rally office predicts wind with up to 27 knots but also some gusts around 30-40. While 27 is just on the edge what i would accept for the Parasailor 30 and especially 40 is way to much especially in these waves. Wave heigths are predicted to be 3.5m and we already stared to surf again. The problem is not the surfing but when the boat then brakes the te...

Around 3.30 we took the Parasailor down because of lack of wind. Then later in the morning around 5.30 a dark wall hit us and the wind went up to approx 35 knots. The boat got a good wash down and waves were building up locally so that we had to increase the response of the autopilot to keep the boat on course. For safety reasons we started both engines and i was sitting outside in the rain. The rain came from behind and despite the fact that i was sitting under the bimini roof i got soaking wet and cold. When the sun was coming up and then wind had a steady 15 knots we directly put the Parsailor back up and now we are doing between 6 and 7 knots. Lets hope that this continues for a while. Here is one of the 200 pictures we took today flying a Sutton Freeform matress kite and a Ricoh Caplio digital camera taking pictures every 5 seconds.The original snaps are COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL, this one here is just to small due to the bandwith of the line. I will upload better quality ones, once we ar...

Since the wind died down again we had to bring the Parasailor down. Why not stop for a quick bath ?? so we jumped into the water and had a short swim. No comparison to the canaries. The water has 27 degrees and you feel you could stay there for hours! GREAT! But now the wind should come back!