A few stats about the trip--it took 8 days and 14.2 hours; we traveled 1320 nautical miles (nm); the rhumb line distance was 1164 NM; our average over the ground speed was 6.4 kts; our average rhumb line speed was 5.66 kts; we used 125.8 gallons of fuel; we ran the engine 107 hours and the genset 22 hours. We had to replace some damaged hardware; had a bit of a surprise in that one of our propane tank valves failed and spewed propane into the air (it was a bit of a surprise and thankfully no one was injured); found out that it could simply be due to a blown disk; easily replaceable; we will investigate further. We enjoyed the three large mahimahi that we caught while offshore; prepared scampi, serviche, sashimi, and baked fish.
It is now Thanksgiving Day, a first for us to not be with family. We have been on anchor for a few days, a week after arriving, and we are still chilling out; catching up on little maintenance items, shopping, laundry, etc. After being here a few days, we realized how intense the sun is and spent a valuable bit of time designing and sewing an extension bimini to the hard dodger; this has worked out great and provides good shelter in the cockpit; we think we will also be able to keep it in place while sailing. Making preparations to repair the ripped spinnaker with my nifty onboard sewing machine. Terry installed the wind generator and, unfortunately, found that there is probably a broken connection in the cable leading to the electrical panel. The wind generator itself works like a charm in winds that we had that ranged between 20-36 kts.
It seems to rain here daily and then instantly sunny and hot again. We are winding down on key projects and plan to start enjoying some relaxing activities, snorkeling; scuba, etc. We will stay in St Thomas for another week and then onto our next island. Wednesday seems to be the banner cruise ship day; there were four in the harbor yesterday; one at the mouth of the harbor and two at Crown Bay harbor; landing approximately 14,000 people onto the island; obviously tourism is key to the economy.
We are looking forward to a visit by my son (also our webmaster), Cory and his girlfriend sometime in January. We plan to stay in the Caribbean until May when we will move northerly to Bermuda to be in a position to begin our next large passage; Bermuda to the Azores. Seems like a long way off; we will basically have six months to meander around the islands.
Terry updated the travel log for those interested in seeing the distances and places that we have already traveled. In summary, we have traveled over 3,200 miles on Zelda since leaving early July 2000.
Regards from Terry and Marie, S/V Zelda