Hello Friends and Family! This is your noon update for our Day 2 trip to the Azores from Lagos,Portugal.
It was a long tough night aboard. As I suspected, the Predictwind routing model, wind speeds and wave action were wrong. Where we should’ve had 15 knots we had a sustained 25 knots with gusts to the low 30’s. That would’ve been fun enough but the sneaky little Algorithm informed us of 1 meter seas and we, of course, found 2-3 meters seas all chunked up by the past few days. We reefed down and hand steered through the night (Harry, the autohelm could not handle the situation). We reached a scary 12.4 knots racing down the front of a wave and, on the positive side, broke Heldeleine’s 24 hour miles-made with 183 miles!!
The crew is hanging in there with only 1 1/2 feeling queasy. Good spirits this morning. The boat is doing wonderfully with all systems doing what they should do. I will try to update each day.
Regards