Wind died. Dousing the spinnaker and running the starboard engine.

credit Dana

Dana playing guitar and singing.

Spinnaker up. Need more wind!

Playing with spinnaker. Can't let Wayne have all the fun.

I took advantage of the down time to do a proper set of physical therapy exercises. My shoulder has been giving me some warning signs.

Friday morning.

Acquired very peaceful slow sunny day. Wayne is entertaining himself with the spinnaker. Dana is trying to achieve the optimum temperature while reading a book. These are some of the best moments.

Captain Dana is wandering around the boat grumbling about the heat. trying to find some shade. yesterday he was wearing a jacket that played out about the cold. this guy's not as amenable as we thought.

Wayne caught a small Mahi. They let it go but it looks like it expired. Sad. 🥺

Sad to see so much plastic floating with the seaweed. 🥺

There is a fly.

Sargasso seawead

We just saw three small whales. I caught video of one and we saw two breach. Very cool.

we just saw two whales. so far. this trip we have seen a whale each day. this time Yermo got video and one even jumped.

Woke up of my own accord at 09:50 after a nice sleep to find Dana and Wayne flying the spinnaker. Seas are really calm with little wind. Clouds on the horizon.

Wayne- It's warm this morning! I've finally allowed myself to get a decent stretch of uninterrupted sleep, I've been neglecting my rest until it caught up to me last night. That fatigue was leading to errors and this morning I am nursing a rope burn on my right hand sustained last night when Yermo and I were rerigging the sail plan to go back to motor sailing again. I'm sure Yermo has documented our travails.

Capt. Dana rerigged again early this morning to accommodate the light and still variable breeze when there's any at all.We are now motor sailing to our waypoint south of Bermuda at a little over 5kn, heading 169m/autohelm steering.

Watch is over. I talked to Dana about what happened. He heard when things went sideways and when the diesel turned on but said he got a good sleep. "I didn't hear
any screaming so I went back to sleep. I wasn't concerned."

That's encouraging.

I'm bummed the date order bug isn't fixed.

My iPhone still has a good fix. We have many GPS capable devices aboard.

The chartplotter just lost its fix on GPS satellites so can't navigate us to the target waypoint. Hmmm.

The wind is just crazy coming from all directions.

Sadly, the datenordering bug also affects wall posts. I thought it did not. It happens afternuploads to the server so it's most likely a server side bug.

I just relieved Wayne. The constellation Orion is clearly visible above asmit wasnon my last crossing to Sint Maarten.

Wayne is exhaustednand I suspect he will go down hard.

I was going to take a shower but was too tired so tried to take a nap. I think I slept for at least a little bit. For a moment I thought I heard the auditory illusions I had heard on Tabasco.

The auto-helm is making a more niticible sweaking noise. I hope we haven't damaged it.

Well that did not go as planned.

We had bith sails up and were taking a more northernly course to keep the headsail full. At first this worked well but some time agter both Wayne and Dana went down the wind started to shift inconsistently. It would die down to nothing and then pick up sometimes 40 degrees from where it had been. It kept shifting around wildly so I tried to follow the wind to keep the headsail full and prevent the mainsail from banging around. This meant constant adjustments to the autohelm. I'm guessing these were some larger localized swirls? Not sure but during my watxh the winds switched through 60 degrees.

Wayne came up to relieve me and Inshowed him what I had been doing. He is sleep deprived and was having trouble matching the wind. After a while he mentioned that if we keep this up we'll burn out the auto-helm. This is simething I had not considered. 😳

So we tried to steer by hand to see if that would work. Unfortunately, there's so little feedback in the helm that we were unable to match the wind. At one point I had a braim fault and turmed the wrong way and we ended up in irons. It was too much.

We called it and decided to drop the headsail and motor to course.

Owing to the noise I didn't realize I was in the overwhelmed state and couldn't figure out why the engine wasn't starting. (I was pressing the kill switch.) We got an engine started and slowly managed to turn the boat into the wind. Wayne struggled to free the jib-sheet and when he did lost control of it and got a nasty rope burn. With the headsail flapping about we got it back under control and methodically rolled it im. Wayne then clipped in and went forward to release some tension on the preventer so I could center and cinch down the boom.

During all this time, Dana who had to have been awake, did not come up to intervene. He let is make our mistakes and figure out how to solve them. We knew how to do everything. We just haven't done it often enough especially mot when sleep seprived like we both are.

We are now motoring to course on one engine to conserve fuel. We'll wait until this crazy swirling wind pattern settles down. I: still doing it. I'll have to look up what this phenomenon is. Wayne is on watch and icing his hand with frozen beef packages. I was going to take a shower but I am too tires. I'll do that tomorrow.

I am bummed about the mishap but not beating myself up as much as usual. This was a situation we have not encountered before or even come across in any of our reading ... but I am bummed nevertheless. I do not like making stupid mistakes from that "stress overload" state ... it's not a good feeling.

I am now proper tired.

There are moments when the wind just dies and then for a gust seems to come from out if nowhere then builds for a while and suddenly stops again.

The prediction is for the wind to start coming around to the west so I had the iseanto turn northward for a better faster wind angle and ride that rotation to our waypoint suspecting it would provide a net gain. So far it seems to be the case.

It suddenly got so warm that I had
to take my jacket iff but now it is starting to cool down again.