Day 08

Akka sailor, Appie wrote:

It is 3:30 am and we've been sailing all night! The wind came back around 8 pm yesterday evening, and it's a bit unsteady, but it's still windy! We've been sailing a bit too far north, but we expect the wind to change and move south, so we can head straight to the Azores. It's become quite chilly at night and we're all in full suits and hoping it won't drop below freezing (20°C). We're doing around 8 knots in a northeast direction, and of course, it's raining! We can't wait to get back to the Caribbean! 

Last night we had an issue with our GPS system - the whole system went black and nothing worked. So we opened up the panels and followed the wires, and found that the inline fuse (5 amps) that supplied power to all the systems had failed. It was an easy fix, though I don't understand why they put such a low fuse in the system. The problem was solved in 30 minutes and we moved on.

The solar and battery system is working very well. After a night of sailing, it will recharge the system in half a day, provided it's sunny. On cloudy days, it takes more than a day to recharge.

It looks like we've reached the trade winds back to the Azores, so we'll be covering some miles over the next 4-5 days!