Anchored in Jolly Harbour. Passage complete!

Barring something extraordinary, I will arrive in Antigua some time tomorrow. The weather and wind are perfect, I have all the sails are up and I'm sailing hard, rail in the water, music blaring and never dropping below 7 knots. Of course I have to hold on to everything to move around and there's no cooking. I'll shorten sail at dusk, there's no point trying to sail this hard all night but it's a blast and happy hour is calling.

I picked up the trade winds this morning. At the moment they're out of the east at a nice, easy 15 knots. I'm 320 miles away so a little more than two days. I'm hoping I get another day of this before they go southeast and it get's a little harder to stay pointed at Antigua.

I motored all night - there was absolutely no wind at all. The sea was like glass, the moon is nearly full - spectacular. The wind started to pick up this morning. Right now I have all the sails up but the wind is NE at 5-10 knots. Not really enough to give me decent speed so I've left the motor running. I'll be glad when the trip is over but it's been a very nice sail. ETA is still 15 or 16 November.

Today, it's officially tropical sailing. The shirt is off, the deck is warm, the sun is shining. No trade winds yet though, the wind is still out of the NW aroudn 15 knots. It should be dieing out and shifting the southeast tomorrow or the next day but I'm getting close. Less than 600 miles to go so I'll arrive on the 16th at the latest, possibly the 15th.

Boy it's been a long day! The wind started misbehaving around 4AM. A long succession of clear air squalls. There's no rain so they don't show on radar and there's no real cloud formation with them either. Sometimes it's sunny, sometimes not. It goes from 15 to 30 with even higher gusts in a minute. I'm either crawling along without enough sail out or totally overpowered. So I've been all day playing with sails - that is NOT how I like to sail. So I set the boat up for 30-35 knots of wind, turned on the engine and took a nap. Much better! :-) I think I'll keep it like this for a while.