In the Trade Winds

I guess I’m in the trade winds now, steady winds from the NNE force 4-6. They will move south with the sun and the ITCZ before we set off from the Canaries in January and it’s recommended to head SSW until well established within them for the Atlantic crossing, but this is I suppose a foretaste of what may be to come.

I had full main and gena up for most of yesterday, I gybed onto port for a bit and in the afternoon decided to try sailing with just the poled out genoa, to see how it was. I stowed the main and with the genoa poled out to starboard we made 6.5 knots still. We had been rolling a fair bit with the sea on the quarter. Once established under the genoa only I tried a few courses but rolling seems to be a fair bit worse without the steadying effect of the main. For the crossing, many boats just use headsails as it’s nearly downwind and they balance the boat well, directionally. We’ll have to wait and see, the rolling is uncomfortable. This morning I’ve set the staysail out to port with a block on my toerail - as far outboard as I can reasonably get it, this is working fine but it’s a fairly low powered sail, it would be good to pole it out, I mihgt see if I can find anything like on ols dinghy boom locally or maybe adapt my second spinnaker pole.

I had my first curry of the trip last night, chicken which was good, I’d ended up with some superprocessed rice, pillau in a plastic packet, a guest left it at the house earlier in the year. It was fine, certainly very easy to heat up, just fry it for a couple of minutes, but it has a shelf life of about a year, not in the fridge, so I wonder what they have done to stop it going off, rice can be dodgy normally if kept too long in the fridge. As I say, it was fine but I don’t think I’ll be rushing off to buy any, speaking of which, I’ve not seen those Pillau rice stck cubes recently, do they still make them? I haven’t looked but it’s a stock cube you put in your rice water with spices and colouring to make it tasty I remember them from ages ago.

We only have 215 miles to run which could see us there tomorrow night but I’ll slow down to arrive in the morning, it’s tricky enough berthing by oneself in a new marina without it’s being dark.

I ruined breakfast this morning, absolutely irritating. I was having bacon and scrambled egg, I’d forgotten to put some toast on and turned the egg off whilst the toast cooked but there was enough thermal inertia in the pan to keep cooking the egg so it was marginally overdone - no longer in that delicious creamy stage, it hadn’t gone anywhere near the school or hospital stage of awfulness but was still a huge disappointment. No cetaceans to report, today, I’ve seen several pods of dolphins since setting off and just the one or two Orcas whatever they were the day before yesterday.