I became very lazy these days. The wind helped us sailing in a more straight line due to a change of direction becoming southeasterly. This is a bit of an anomaly in this area where the winds are supposed to be NE. It does help us however, as now we are able to sail at 6-7 kn directly, without zig-zag-ing, to or destination.
It also helped me to understand, what I couldn’t really understand reading weather books: this is the effect of a large air mass spinning clockwise, named “the Azores High” because it has it’s center more or less above he Azores Islands, thousands of km away. This mass is currently moving towards East and this makes the wind to blow from a different direction than usual. It will return in a few days to it’s “normal” place and so will the winds to their “normal direction”.
Nothing else…or…ah yes, just a few squalls (the mini-storms I was talking an a previous post), one flying fish (only) and another breakage.
The other day, during lunch, we just saw our largest headsail (81 sqm) falling into the water. Fortunately, the metal swivel at the top didn’t hit anything and got directly in the water.
The halyard (the rope, going through and coming up at the top of the mast) used to hoist the sail, broke due to the constant chafe created by the movement of the sail. Fortunately there’s a second halyard that we could use to hoist this large sail when the wind will get again very light. But it’s annoying 🙂

Tonight Saint Nicholas will put presents in Paul’s shoes and he is very keen to clean and polish them in order to receive the nicest presents.

625 nautical miles to go, the chart plotter (the equivalent of a GPS in a car) tells us we have 4 more days to go, but I believe it will be 5 days as the winds will get very light after Saturday and we’re not yet in motoring range (i.e. we don’t have enough diesel to cover all the remaining distance)…just got interrupted by a squall with all the associated sail reducing manoeuvrings…the sea state (waves) behind this squall, which covered a larger area than usual, is not so nice bu won’t last long.

That’s it for today!
This is Seven Seas Adventure! Over! (to you)