(April 21, 2014) I guess I jinxed it by being such a braggart. In a couple of ways. First, after all my boasting about the great weather and what not, the last two days have been everything the first two days were not. We have had absolutely no wind at all, we are just about becalmed. The only good thing is that there is a favorable current that has pushed us s-l-o-w-l-y in the right direction all today. Yesterday we had more wind, but we had a nasty foul current that had us actually going WNW when I was steering SSW. I could only tell a problem when I noticed my course over ground bore no resemblance to my programmed heading. Then I saw that my position reading had me going north and west. And there was nothing to do except steer hard south, which gave us a westerly heading with a tiny bit of north. Then there was a squall this morning - the winds registered 20 knots sustained, with gusts of 25, but luckily for us it was to our back, and the seas weren't too rough and it was shoving us the right way. So we reveled in that and were delighted to get soaked and lose sleep. I then spent the rest of today anxiously searching the horizon for any sign of another squall - anything to get moving again! When you have these tropical squalls, they are strong but short lived (a couple hours at best)and they suck all the energy out of the area they pass through, causing these calms after. The only problem is that these periods of no winds can often be accompanied by confused seas, which rock the hell out of a stationary boat. That was this morning, but this pm was calm as a bathtub, almost. So what have I not told? Right now it is still calm, but we are actually moving under sail at a rolicking 2.7 knots, a great improvement over the 1 to .9 of earlier. I took down all the sails because they were doing nothing more than slatting about, causing the boat to bat around even more.
Of course I forgot to tell the best part . . . our engine is having difficulty and we can't use it. So now we are a true sailing vessel, and if we drift, we drift. No motoring to speed things along. Mike is pretty sure he knows what it is - he says the bearings are going out in the engine's water pump. It makes a terrible noise, so no using it. It is not a disaster at all, rather an inconvenience. But I think we were starting to motor too often, just for convenience, and that is not a habit we wish to develop, as we (at least Mike is, the jury is out on me) are sailing purists, the most annoying people at any yacht club get-together. So sail on we shall!
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