Back on Track

After three days of beating into a headwind, we now have winds from the south east and have resumed our course. The high pressure system is moving beneath us and we are catching winds from its trailing, clock-wise edge. We should have three more days of this perfect wind as the system moves south and the winds shift to our tail. The rip in our main sail has not worsened, but we are losing about a half a knot because we can’t remove the third reef. Once the winds shift behind us and we are flying our spinnaker, we should be able to take the main down to repair it.

We are crossing the southern edge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland at the moment. The weather is gorgeous with sunny skies and calm seas. Earlier in the day we passed through a choppy patch of sea littered with sea gulls going crazy. As we got closer we realized that we were sailing through a feeding frenzy of various fish and dolphins. A pack of 30 to 50 dolphins began leaping beside our boat in unison. They would synchronously jump out of the water and race each other to the front of our bow. We have some great footage and pictures, but unfortunately our limited bandwidth connection cannot support the upload.

We have been having trouble sending emails. I have been trying to reply to as many of your emails as possible, but I’m not sure which ones are getting through. We have been able to receive emails just fine, and we really appreciate your support and encouragement. These past few days have been really rough.

If you haven’t checked out our progress using Google Earth, I would highly recommend it. Thanks goes to Seth and Craig for setting up such a cool visualization of our journey!