LinoCat

I just hoisted the courtesy flag of St Lucia. It looks a little like the symbol of Startrek or "Raumschiff Enterprise" as it was known in Germany. Saint Lucia has around 160.000 on 616 square kilometer. The currency is the east caribbean dollar and the capital is Castries. Main export goods are banana and beer! So we have to check out the beer for sure! Here you see a picture of the flag flying on our starbord side.

We now have less than 100NM to go. So we chatted during the breakfast how it was: It was nice and easy but we think that on a catamaran it is much easier than on a monohull. Lani also had no problems at all. She enjoyed the attention she was getting. WHat would we do different? Stronger fishing line and steel pre line and bigger lures. More cucumbers and if needed more soft drinks. We need to see dolphins or whales. I think we are one of the few boats that did not see any dolphins or whales on the trip. We think that pasta dishes are perfect and also the indian dishes were much appreciated. Communication was fun. We liked the ARC net but the groups should be different for the future because we were in the small boat group but we were rather always near the bigger boats. Therefore my role as a net controller was also made impossible. We played Trivial Pursuit over SSB with Tucanon and Raylah and also enjoyed that. The german atlantic morning round with DH2LC on 14313 was always a good s...

Hi, we now have 230 NM to go until Rodney bay. If the wind keeps blowing with around 20 knots we should be able to arrive between 9th and 10th of december. What do we have do besides a new hair cut? -Get the fenders out and inflate them (some are deflates to give more storage space -Get the mooring lines ready -Get the white sails ready (since the last mile will be against the wind we can not use the Parasailor) -Get the papers ready for customs -Hoist the ARC banner and the St Lucia courtesy flag -Attach our Rally ID (213) to the starbord side (we had it all on the other side for the start) -check in the maps where the finishing line is -get the radio ready for the pre finishing call on VHF channel 77 -Pose for the finishing line picture by a professional photographer -Be ready to get seasick once the ground is not moving any more :-)

......and the nature just wanted to show us who the boss is. We escaped a few squalls but then one hit us and we had around 30 knots of wind before we could bring the Parasailor down at 5 in the morning. So we just kept it up and made sure it was not flapping around and it survived. Afterwards we took it down for 2 hours and then brought it back up again. Wind ist still strong and we are doing more than 8 knots constantly. Now one of the few thing i need before arrival is a hair cut. Lets see if we manage that today :-) This picture shows how the squalls are shown on our radar

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 :-)