The Burnetts left the Azores yesterday at 11 am Azores time. This trip should only be about 5 days, so hopefully we won’t see any surprise fronts. We better not.
No offense, Azores, but Mel is tired of being cold. She only brought four long-sleeved shirts and four pairs of pants. So she is overjoyed to see temps in the high 70’s and sunny weather in Portugal. This of course means that she will have to pay more attention to using sunscreen again, which she has slacked off doing in the overcast days. Of course, she recently completed this horrible wrinkle survey for 23 and Me where she had to compare her wrinkles to pictures of progressively wrinkly faces and was traumatized afterwards because she kept on answering in the 40th percentile, and those pictures were not pretty. So there is a price to lying around in the sun all day, but most of Mel’s wrinkles are the worry-kind that occurred in the middle of the night in a dark, cold hospital as she tried to interpret bicarb results. And, more recently, 5 meter waves. So avoid crossing the Atlantic, people. It’s not good for your skin.
Boat stuff: 192 nm in 29 hrs, which works out to 159 nm in 24 hrs. Things are going smoothly, with the only snag being our regret that the Parasailor shredded, as we have been in perfect Parasailor conditions, going downwind with no more than 20 kts of true wind. We tried wing-on-wing for a while, with lines holding both the main and jib in place, and our final ruling was: eh. We much prefer to see the 7 -10 kts of speed going off course with the necessity of maybe gybing later than going 5.5 kts straight on the rhumb line. Currently we are motorsailing with just the jib up as our apparent wind is less than 10 kts and our wind angle is around 140 degrees. Waves were pretty big there for a while, with occasional 9-12 foot rollers, but now they are down to 4-6 ft.
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