French Guiana has come and gone, and we are now in the waters of Brazil!
Weird weather to go with it, too, as we are now in the ITCZ, or Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is a fancy scientific name for the mixed up region where the northern and southern hemisphere weather systems collide. Last night we saw huge squalls and torrential rains with East winds, then early morning saw SW winds, and for the first time the squalls did not go from our left to our right. Lots of rain through the morning, but this afternoon is back to our clear and sunny with light winds, although now they are from the NE.
The promise of a dry afternoon has made me declare today to be laundry day- and we now have lots of colored decorations streaming from the lifelines on both sides of the ship, drying in the hot tropical sun.
For now, we are going to try to stay pretty much on the rhumb line towards the far east corner of Brazil, which means we will be far offshore from the Amazon river basin and all of its effluent. If the adverse currents get uglier, we may try going back inshore, but it would be a pretty big detour. If we can hold the course, we should be out of sight of land for maybe 600 miles or so.
04.18N 50.58W 1448nm gone, 3493nm to go. 3pm 7/7