It is strange how one tolerates over two weeks of being offshore with patience and inner peace, but as land approaches, the peace goes out the porthole. Let’s get there already!
Of course, Master Oogway the wind god has decided to extract more patience out of us by making our predicted landfall in the middle of the night. After Mel noticed “Marine Farm: Position Unknown” on the chart right outside Port St. Charles, that was just not going to happen. So now the Burnetts are in the frustrating position of having to slow themselves down so that they can arrive Saturday morning after sunrise. Master Oogway is helping, though, and the winds are quite light, less than 11 kts true. When the boat goes less than five kts, we feel like we are standing still. It’s a good time to break out the yoga. Of course, Mel prefers the more energetic-sounding poses like “Warrior II” to the sludgey mountain or tree poses. Baby steps.
Boat stuff: 142 nm in 26 hours. Less than 200 nm to go! The spinnaker is still up, still on port tack, and fortunately the swell has also decreased to less than four feet with only a rare random beam wave. More swell than this and the spinnaker snaps and pops too much in the light winds. We might take it down tomorrow and broad reach on the jib only to slow us down even more.
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