Yesterday turned out OK. The wind didn’t veer as early as forecast, so that meant I was sailing a close reach for much of the day- about 12 hours of sailing lightning bolts instead of the expected 6. But in the evening the wind lightened and started veering a bit, allowing easier sailing through the night.
I made good progress, and expect the wind to start getting stronger and rotating through E to NE today. It’s remained sunny and clear, but it did get cold last night- I’ve had to add a few layers.
One interesting thing is that I passed through a debris field of river effluent about 15 miles long, when I was 8 miles offshore. Literally thousands of tree branches, clumps of weeds, and various other trash and debris, including two nice dining room chairs, floating along all spread out everywhere. I don’t know where it came from, but there it was.
When sailing along a coastline, there are always some places that are windier than others, due much to local topography. In Brazil, they make it easy to see when you are approaching a windy place- there will be hundreds of huge wind turbines lined up to take advantage of it. I’ve sailed literally thousands of miles of Brazilian coast, and am still amazed at the number of wind farms they have. We may talk about it a lot, but the few turbines we have in the Bay Area and Palm Springs are nothing compared to what they are doing down here.
Finally, and I know I will probably jinx the last days of this trip, but I realized this morning that other than a few squalls around the equator, I have sailed 37 days so far without rain. I think that’s pretty lucky…
30.10S 50.06W 4887nm gone, 570nm to go. 8am 9/14