Author: Seth
Pic: Do we speed up, or slow down?
Google Earth Position at 06:00: 22 43 639N, 65 02 723W

At 6:00am we had only 256 nautical miles to go and we all started to get excited. From our morning and evening radio check-ins we could see that the entire fleet of boats was homing in on the BVIs and beginning to congregate into one mass of ships. Or so it would have appeared from space, but in reality we were surprised to not see anyone or anything. Aside from two random sailboat sightings and an occasional tanker, we had only seen two boats in the entire rally, and that occurred way back on day two! At this point we certainly expected to see some of the boats we had caught up to, but in reality they remained ghosts over the horizon.

As it had for the past three days, the winds remained over 20 knots and our boat continued to pound hard into the rough sea conditions. We had been double reefed for three days, so it was an exciting moment when we realized the winds had eased slightly and we were able to go back to our now permanent first reef. We hoped this would also ease the pounding, but our increased speed kept it about the same.

Later in the day the winds crept back up and I had to make a decision to reef and slow the boat down or keep our current speed and arrive earlier. Although everyone wanted to keep the current boat speed and sail by the reefing plan provided by Lagoon, we decided to do so in order to prevent anything else from breaking. This turned out to be a good idea as we barely lost any speed with the additional reef, indicating that we had been over powering the sails and that the French apparently don't reef until absolutely necessary (this became a bit of a joke for the day, with us imitating the French production company and ridiculing their overly aggressive sail plan).

We were all anxious to land in paradise and share a pain killer with our new friends, but I was also tired of things breaking. So far in the trip, the following things had gone wrong:
1) Both house batteries were replaced.
2) The refrigerator latch broke, now held closed with duc-tape.
3) We ripped the mast car off the mast, likely scarring the actual track.
4) The port winch occasionally did not rotate in both directions.
5) Our bilge pump on the port side appeared not to drain.
6) A piece of wood paneling came free from the starboard hand rail.
7) We tore a three foot section of the sailbag while reefing.
8) Our watermaker, which had just been installed, failed to keep consistent pressure.
9) Our generator overheated and failed repeatedly.
10) The port cabin window and starboard head latch leaked when submerged in water.
11) The window track stopper snapped off the rear window.

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. I felt like we had bought a lemon - that the previous owners had known something I did not - that we had been duped. But then reality set in. This was every bit what I had been told to expect countless times. As the saying goes, "the act of sailing is waiting for something to break in exotic locations." Or, "a hole in the water you throw money into."

So, with an additional reef in our sails and looking for our non-existent boat friends nearby, we continued on. Tomorrow would be an exciting day. We only had 256 more miles. At a rate of 160 miles a day we could expect to be in the BVIs by the end of the day tomorrow. If nothing else breaks, we might even make it by sunset.