Well I guess I jinxed us with the Otto discussion. The waves and wind have built up to a point where old Otto cannot keep up with the sea state. So we have been taking turns hand steering every two hours. Our new 24 hour record is 203 miles and we are 1511 away from Grenada. It just occurred to me that I have never gone over 200 miles on a sailboat in 24 hours...yahoo! Tomorrow we get to have our halfway party as we get even closer to the Caribbean.

In order to keep the boat sailing safely we have set up a watch schedule to sail day and night. The night schedule is the most difficult. Since we have four guys we have divided the shifts into 2 hours on and 6 off. The Civil has the 12am to 2am, the Accountant has the 2am to 4 am, the Chemical has the 4am to 6am and then the Electrical. We have been very fortunate to have winds from our stern for most of the trip. Our Automatic Identification System (AIS) is our best friend at night. All commercial ships transmit their position over the airwaves and their position shows up on our chart plotter. So far we have seen very few ships, but we are always watching.

The good thing about going this fast, other than getting to Grenada earlier, is that we are having a competition for who can get the most miles in 2 hours. The Civil smugly had the record until the Account edged him out with an astounding 18.2 miles. That is an average of just over 9 knots. You can definitely water ski behind Azure II right now. The bad thing about going this fast is that we can no longer comfortably watch movies. We had a run of 6 nights in a row where we would watch a movie just after dinner. So far we have covered Animal House, Into Liquid, and others as we swap movie night choices. I am sure Captain Ron will make an appearance before the end of the trip.