Category: Latest News

There’s a low left of me. The sun has been behind the high clouds in the north-west in the evenings. So no spectacular sunsets on this part of the trip. The view at 04:30 h this morning was not too shabby though.

Very strong rain last night. Wind from all directions. I could not sleep before 04:00 h. I had to take down the mainsail at midnight (45 min). And then, another sailboat altered their course and sailed parallel to me, same speed, sometimes coming closer towards me (4 nm). I was sailing with the windvane. Due to the variable winds and squalls my course was all over the chart. In the early morning hours the rain looked like this.

Nobody knows the wind direction at my current position. The chart shows the predictions of six models. I mostly rely on the European weather model (ECMWF, black line), followed by the American model (GFS, green line). Let’s find out whether it will be 170° or 225° later this afternoon. What is your bet?

My early-morning exercise was taking the mainsail down. The stubborn wave / no wind combination caused the mainsail to flap continuously. This had to stop. After this physical exercise I had worked up a sweat. The smell of my T-shirt … well, would remind you of some big cat, I guess.

Today is one of the very few really relaxed days of bluewater sailing. Danke, liebe Kirsten für deine unendliche Geduld und Unterstützung!

Today I have a visitor: a red-billed tropicbird (Phaethon aethereus), Rotschnabel-Tropenvogel. These long-tailed birds and their subspecies have become an embosomed feature of tropical islands to Kirsten and me. Mit liebem Gruß an Merle.

With the mainsail and the genoa in the third reef, winds gusting to 30 kn I slammed through the waves. In these conditions I couldn’t sail upwind but had to bear off to an apparent wind angle of 60°. I am heading straight north now. In two days the wind will turn clockwise (veer) allowing for an easterly course.

The Atlantic is covered with large patches of sargassum seaweed. These brown algae swim at the surface of the sea, in some places even extending 10 cm above the waterline. I encounter this since about 2500 nm, it started north of Brazil. The hard clumps scrarch along my hull, and I had absolutely no growth when I arrived in Antigua. Sometimes I have to stop to free the rudder and the windvane rudder from large clumps of seaweed. The seaweed is home to smaller fish which you can see in the blue water underneath the plants. The total biomass of the weaweed must be gigantic. Schönen Gruß an Sören, ohne Zusammemhang mit dem Seetang!

The North Atlantic looks like a lake in Bavaria. In the late afternoon some rainy squalls surrounded me. I took down the sails and motored through the night.

I have fixed the coffe machine to the table with velcro. The blue webbing keeps the water reservoir from falling off in the waves.