We left Tenerife bound for Antigua. There was strong NE’ly winds forecast for the first 6 days and then light E’ly winds after that. With this in mind the plan was to head south west first and then turn to the west and run down wind to Antigua.

We also engaged a weather routing service, SatOcean, who I had worked with previously and knew to be good with currents.  Here is the route as recorded by GPS.

With Mark we had three watch keepers so kept a 4 on / 8 off rotation and we all got plenty of sleep. All the watch keepers were told to ‘hunt the current’. This meant deviating to keep the speed over the ground as high as possible. It was fun and made the watches more interesting. As SatOcean were keeping us close to the best current it was just fine tuning.

Second day out and easy weather

Later the same day Mark managed to catch this photo

5 days later running down the NE’ly.

Tried some trolling and despite keeping the speed up had three strikes and landed one Mahi-Mahi. Dinner that night, it was great.

Our first tropical visitor, a Tropicbird.

Four days out of Antigua we came across this yacht, close inspection and obviously no crew on board. Rang it in on the sat phone to Antigua SAR and they told us the lone skipper had been picked up by a cargo ship on the 19th February – before we left the Canaries.

After 12 days, landfall.

We had a landfall party on the flybridge, burgers, beers, a bottle of wine and Mark smoked his landfall stogie.

Summary:

2771 NM in 323 hours, 8.58 kts and 2390 US gallons consumed. 830 US gallons ROB on arrival.