Russ arrived to help us sail to New Orleans.
Leaving Clearwater at 7:30 PM Friday evening we set the engines to push us at 5.5 knots, that’s a little over half throttle to optimize fuel burn. Friday night winds were almost non-existent. Fortunately we had a good current making 3 to 4 tenths a knot on top of our water speed. Saturday morning we started out on a port tack, mid morning the wind changed and for a couple hours we had 7 knots over the starboard rail. After the starboard tack played out the tide reversed and we were seeing neutral to negative 2/10ths speed loss and back on the expected port tack.
Saturday Morning about noon we could see100 yards to the right there was wind… the water was not slick but had a bit of a wind ripple on it so we turned and went over there. We got our 2/10ths of current back and have been on port tack for the last 3 hours doing 6.5 to 6.9 knots…. a full knot over motoring speed. I’m certainly satisfied with that.
We are approaching the 20 hours mark in the passage. At 3:30PM we will refill the main tanks and see how much fuel we have burned the first third of the trip.
Last night about 1AM I saw 3 dolphin on the bow, Russ and I just saw two different groups of three. He got a short video of the second pod we encountered as they played in our bow wakes. We have seen quite a bit of trash… bottles and everything imaginable on the smooth water.
The 3 hour shifts we intend to take have been a little loosely regulated. I would do 4 hours, then Jono did 4 or 5 today, Russ is on right now.
We just finished filling the main tanks after 20 hours of travel, we burned 18 gallons… less than 1 gallon an hour for both motors. That means with the fuel we have on board we can arrive with enough to completely refill the main tanks when we get there. So at 5.5 knots I can easily count on 1 gallon an hour fuel burn and be OK. I don’t really want to speed up because we don’t want to arrive before daylight Monday morning and the motors are quite happy at their present RPM.
We also expect to be able to sail on one or no engines a bit tomorrow night and Monday… so we have plenty fuel! That’s very comforting.
Jono is down sleeping to be ready for his night duty. I took a nap earlier and will take another after my next shift which starts now, 4PM Saturday.
5:20PM Saturday: The boys are laying down, I’m seeing some nice wind in the 10 knot range 35 and 40 degrees off the bow! Motor sailing that’s just fine…. SYL is holding 7 knots, if she reaches 7.5 I’ll take one motor off. If that stays at 7 knots I’ll become a sailboat again making around 6 knots with both motors up. My shift is from 4 to 7 PM right now so I’ll get Jono out of my bed about dark. I’ll be back on duty 6 hours later at 1AM in the morning. I knew we would have some sailing wind eventually but I didn’t expect it this soon so that’s a bonus. I’m still motor sailing but at a very nice clip. During the middle 1/3 of our passage, I don’t mind making some speed, if it turns out that we have to slow down to keep from arriving at the Venice cut before daylight Monday… we will have time to sail at 5 knots for a while if need be. That would be nice to eliminate the drone of the Yamahas for a while. They sure are sweet little motors…. at ¾ throttle they burn about ½ a gallon an hour each…. but after listening to them for 22 hours it would be nice to have silence.
Other than about 4 hours of the trip we have had a favorable current up to 4/10ths of a knot. Hope that holds!
Sorry about the randomness… I’ll go back and clean this up later but wanted to post progress home so far. SYL Rusty