Slow and steady

We’ve ended up motoring with the jib up, which gave us a little lift for a while but eventually the wind came around to the east, the direction we’re headed, and dropped to insignificant. We don’t like burning this much fuel but we heard on the weather this morning that by Friday a line of serious squalls is headed our way and we’d like to be buttoned up and settled in somewhere safe well ahead of then. We still have a broken zipper on one panel of our cockpit enclosure that we should have had replaced in Fort Lauderdale. Looks like it’ll be a while until we’re in another place with canvas services so we plan to sew it shut in the meantime. The enclosure is old and crumbling in places but does an amazing job of protecting us in wind and rain.

This has been a quiet passage. We altered course very slightly just once when we saw that a freighter was going to pass within a mile of us. We probably didn’t have to, but better safe than sorry. Other than that, most of the ships we saw overnight were cruise ships heading to and from Nassau, south of us.

Our new AIS displays the ships around us on our chartplotter screen but there’s also an iPhone app that allows us to see a list of ships nearby from anywhere in the boat. On the list you can see CPA, closest point of approach, and TCPA, time of closest point of approach. In this photo you can see that none of the boats will be a threat to us. It’s very cool.

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3 Comments

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3 Responses to Slow and steady

  1. Deb

    Great for you guys! Out of US waters !!

  2. Jeff & Carla

    At first I thought ‘broken zipper’ was another nautical term – ha ha!
    Safe travels you two!!!

  3. Good to see you are on your way, Followed your movements on your SPOT yesterday.

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