450 miles to go
“Only” 450 nauticalmiles are in between us and land in Barbados! In the last 2 days we are getting advantage of 20-25 knots of constant wind that is letting us log an average of 7.5 miles per hour, at the beginning with some anxiety for Zoe’s stability. In fact, she is showing a great balance even when the mix of wind gusts and high side waves challenge her.
If the wind keeps this pace, we hope to arrive in Barbados by next Monday. The challenge is that we must get there before 8:00 pm (actually much earlier than that) as the custom office only works from 8am through 8pm, and you are not allowed to stay in the Barbados cost without having cleared formalities. Alternatively, we will need to slow down to arrive on Tuesday morning.
Though we are still very much enjoying getting our eyes list in the ocean, we start getting eager to put our feet on the ground, and enjoy a meal without having to deal with the continuos rolling, which means catching the fork or the glass that is falling as you left it for one second.
As a matter of curiosity, we are naturally switching to the new time zones even though our clock on board is still synchronized with Greenwich’s time. This means our watch shifts are starting a bit later as well as the meals that revolve around them. In the longitude where we are in this very moment the sunrise is at 9:38 UTC, while sunset is at 20:58 UTC. You would wonder how do we know.. Magics of the GPS!
In Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean islands the time difference is -4 hours compared to Greenwich time, which means -5 hours compared to Italian time or +1 hour compared to New York.
Wonderful update! Wish you a safe and convenient “last mile” towards Barbados! Fair winds and following seas!!
I loved this post; you can feel the happyness of this two sailors; they had to face a lot of troubles and the weather has not contributed to easy their task, but they enjoy all the hours past and all the hours they will face.
Don’t forget they are only two, they have to share 24 hours of hard job. It’s easy they work, 12 hours each a day, for a month, alone in the middle of the Ocean.
Oh, my heroes!