Yacht Saga Insurance
Friday 9th March 2007
Lat 23 57S Long 037 26W
Miles To Norfolk, USA: 4,618 nm
Distance In 24 Hours: 102.8 nm
Average Speed In 24 Hours: 4.28 knots

“Another lovely sailing day onboard the good ship SAGA , blue rippled seas, white puffy clouds, wind at 4-5 knots and the boat slipping along nicely, if not always in the desired direction at 4-5 knots. This boat is such a pleasure to sail, very responsive and quick, she just needs the right winds to show her paces. And I’ve solved the problem of where to hide from the sun in a cooler spot, it is sitting in the sail locker. One good thing about all this sun is that the solar panels are doing a lot of charging so I have not had to charge the batteries by day, which keeps the temperature down a bit in the cabin. No swimming to-day as we did not slow down sufficiently. That is something reserved for very calm occasions.”

“As far as the race is concerned, well we did 61 miles in the right direction yesterday, of course that was a product of quite a lot of tacking, we sailed about 110 miles, but in zig zags, so the average was 4.5 knots of actual sailing for the day. We are still trapped by the north-easterlies and that looks likely to last a while longer yet. We are now north of where Unai and Dalton got favourable winds, but that was then and things have changed.. And that’s enough about the race.”

“My favourite time of the day is sundown. The cabin is still too warm for comfort but in the cockpit the wind is cool, and, for example, last night, I sat there enjoying watching the colours in the clouds, sipping a glass of wine from a bottle kindly given to me by the crew of Zephyrus in Ushuaia, thanks chaps, delicious, and putting the world to rights. Then its time to think of preparing dinner. I realised at lunchtime that I had not eaten since yesterday midday, mainly because I was very tired and decided that trying to get sleep was more important, but the wind change alarm was going off so often that sleep for more than a few minutes was just not possible. At least this afternoon I got a straight 2 1/2 hours sleep in the sail
locker and feel a lot better for it. RKJ”