The wind, it seems, has a mind of its own. Yesterday, it decided to veer a little further east and weaken considerably, making it practically useless for our purposes. Not wanting to dawdle any longer than necessary, we've made a strategic course correction. We've fired up the engine and are now heading at 260 degrees – 10 degrees south of our original path, but still aiming slightly north of Trinidad. Our hope is to catch some northerly winds as we progress. If not, well, there's no harm done. However, the weather forecasts aren't exactly optimistic on that front.
The good news is that even with the weak apparent wind hovering around 7 knots, it's still giving us a gentle push. We're maintaining a steady 6 knots at 1800 RPM, and fuel consumption is very economical at around 3.7 liters per hour. So, even though the sails aren't doing much billowing at the moment, we're still making good progress. Our range with this engine efficiency is huge – around 2000 nautical miles!
The other good news is that the GRIB files (weather data files) are still showing green all the way through for the next 10 days, which easily gets us into Trinidad and Tobago. Fingers crossed this holds out!
This might not be the most exciting part of the journey, but hey, it's all part of the experience, and as my sailing motto goes: "a boring time is a good time!" Quite possibly, the remaining days of this section of the blog are going to be completely devoted to lack of wind, fuel consumption, and long-range weather forecasts. Well, I hope they are! We'll keep you updated on our journey, even if it's just a chronicle of our engine purring and the reassuring glow of green on the weather maps.
