Random Thoughts Of An Old Salty Woman!

As many of you who have read our blog for a long time know, I do not write it too often. I usually take over when we are on land. However, long sails put me into a contemplative state and so here I am writing a blog. Firstly, let me also say thank you to all who have written to cheer us on in our long journey across the Atlantic Ocean. We love hearing from you!

For the first time since we have started sailing we have done something that we never thought we would do - we took on crew that we did not know. It was a big step and we thought we prepared everyone including ourselves about the "growing pains" of living with people you have just met. It is different than when you went off to college and met a new roommate. Here, this is it! No new people, nowhere to go except to your bedroom! We were lucky! Greg and Mary are lovely people and go with the flow. They are anxious to learn and keep telling us that they want to continue to sail and are excited to get their own boat, so they too can sail around the globe. Yeah! That was one of my fears - I did not want to discourage them from the cruising life.

As Dave has expressed in other blogs this has been a difficult sail because so many little and big things have gone wrong. Nothing tragic or unworkable but enough that it causes continual stress and one is not able to relax. Dave and I are waiting for the next thing to go wrong!!!! Fortunately, most of the "awe sh-ts!" have been worked out or fixed to the best they can be until we land. Greg and Mary, try to help as much as they can and are willing to go the whole nine yards. They are good sports and that makes things easier.

It has been nice sharing galley responsibilities with Mary. She is a lovely cook so we have really enjoyed her cooking. She has taught us some Tex-Mex meals that I am sure my son-in-law will enjoy along with my daughter! Mary and Greg have been with us now for close to 5 weeks! Time flies!! They are about 10 years our junior so it is fun to watch them learn and experience living life on the ocean. In some ways they are very similar to us. They are very committed to each other and their families, as are we. Sadly they are Florida fans and we are BIG Blue fans but we were willing to let that go!!!!! They help us see things with new excited eyes and new joy. That has been very nice.

All in all, we have been blessed again and we are grateful for all we have and can share with two people we have just really met 5 weeks ago! This past day has been fairly uneventful except we had some excitement with the spinnaker - our brake started slipping so we had to "gerry rig" locking the spinnaker halyard into position to sail. It worked fairly well but taking it down gave us some challenges. We did it and Dave replaced the old brake with a new one this morning.

Until we speak again�...

As of noon today, the end of Day 3, our position is 6 01.8": 20 04.7W, our course is 292 degrees True, our speed is 6.9 knots with an apparent wind of 11.0 knots. The winds are from the SE as are the swells which are between 1 and 2 meters. It has been another mostly sunny, trade winds day�...just lovely. The water temperature is now 86.1 degrees. We made 130 nm today, with a running average of 5.2 knots for the passage. Our average speed keeps on creeping up, as we are making better daily speeds with the spinnaker during the daylight hours. We are about 739 knot SE of the Fernando de Noronha Archipelago, which is about 200 nm east of the Brazilian coast. It is where we plan on turning to the NW to sail up the South American coast, keeping between 200 and 300 nm off the coast line. This will keep us seaward of two groups of sea mounts. They get to within 120 feet of the surface and can cause some nasty seas due to currents moving up and around them from the deep.