Day 105 - Under 400 miles and No Incoming Mail

We went into the night still sailing nicely to the NW. During the evening Sailmail session my blog and other messages went out OK but somewhat unusually there was no incoming mail. It takes 15 or 20 minutes to process grib file requests and when I connected 30 minutes later for the result, and several times thereafter, there were still no incoming messages. I then sent a second grib file request and there was no response to that either. At 3 AM I got up the find the boat traveling well then I connected to Sailmail and still there were no incoming messages. I figured that the organization was experiencing a technical problem (e.g. server down) that would be corrected the following working day.

I woke up again just before the 5 AM alarm went off to find the boat headed south at a brisk pace. It could not have been headed south for long because the change of direction was not showing on the track being displayed on the chart plotter. The conditions were such that I was able to tack the boat with no trouble - made easier by the fact that there is no longer an inner forestay. Then the wind slackened, so I let out more sail and put the boat beam to the wind. Very soon the wind picked up to close to 30 knots which had me scrambling to roll in headsail fast. It was a cloudy and drizzly morning and to the SW I could see a squall that I figured was causing the instability. Fortunately the wind eventually settled down to just under 20 knots from the SW and soon the boat was making directly for Mar del Plata at over 4 knots. From the directions of the winds I figured that there was a low to the south of us, which suited me just fine. The barometer had dropped only 5 HPa to 1007 in the last 18 hours. After the dark days below lat 45S when I had felt trapped by seemingly insurmountable headwinds I was very grateful for the favorable winds of the last few days.

I could see the newly spliced lower shroud nicely taking the strain with each roll of the boat but it was much too loose, so soon I was at the side deck tightening the inner four bulldog clams then tightening the shroud itself. For now the shroud was doing its job nicely.

I then settled down to monitor the boat, the wind, and the weather. We were 415 miles out of Mar de Plata and only 11 miles south of lat 43S. Without a grib file to guide me all I could do was to hope that this wind would last - which had been the way of sailors until very recent times.

It turned out to be a wonderful day of sailing. The wind stayed strong (20-28 kt) and favorable (SW) throughout the day and we made phenomenal progress directly for Mar de Plata. We were on a broad reach and I gave the boat its head figuring that the mainsail and backstay would take much of the load. I watched the boat making over 7 knots over a span of 30 minutes until I shortened sail because the excessive weather helm was giving Jeff trouble and making the headsail was fret a bit. Generally we made over 6 knots. I had initially thought that the wind was from a low passing to the south but the way the wind held and the sky cleared suggested to me that we were in the embrace of a high centered to the west.

At noon our position was 42S45, 052W12, giving us a n-n distance of 94 miles in the direction 313T, directly toward Mar de Plata. We were 378 miles from Mar de Plata, and still moving well. One of my objective was to get above lat 40S as soon as possible and in 24 hours we had moved almost one degree to the north. Needless to say I was very happy with the result but like a good sailor I wanted more.

I connected to Sailmail several times during the day but still did not receive any incoming messages. I sent a message to Sailmail Technical Support advising them of my problem.

At 7 PM local time the wind was still favorable though somewhat diminished in strength we were making 5.7 knots still toward Mar del Plata.

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