Stating our 3rd day and we are are still heading East. The winds have remained out of the north and we are taking advantage of them to get as far east as we as possible before they shift more easterly.
Once they clock to the east, which the trade winds down here always do, we will make our turn to the south and head for the islands. We are still not sure of where we will make land fall, depends on when the wind shifts and we make our turn south.
The weather remains very pleasant, sunny and warm. With just a smidge more wind it would be perfect.
Our position as I write this is “25 22.900n, 071 53.900w” If you Google map exactly those coordinates (without quotes but with comma and spaces) it should show you where we were.
For the technically curious, I thought I might give a short explanation of how these words get posted.
Both WordPress (for our blog) and FaceBook make available special email addresses for making posts via email. So when you send an email to that address it will end up posted on your blog or FB.
After constructing the post via email, the next step is connecting to an email server to get the mail sent.
On the boat we have a special modem called a PACTOR modem that can talk to other modesm over the radio. The radio is an ICOM M802 single sideband transceiver. We can use this radio to talk long range to other radios (we talk every few days to my brother Kurt in Michigan for example) and the PACTOR can also use it to talk to distant computers.
So, once the email is ready, we use the SSB radio and the PACTOR to converse with shore stations and send the mail for us. The shore stations are provided by an organization called “Sailmail” and are located such that users can contact a station from pretty much any in the world.
Jeff and Mary