470nm from St Helena and the clouds have settled since yesterday. We have to sail pretty deep to keep our heading to the island but we had some fun puffs this morning. Surfing down swell at 20kts like there’s nothing to it. Ray and I played our first match of Windigo. A sailing game created in 1968 that we found on Etsy. Serendipity connected us to that game, likely the only one left that isn’t collecting dust in someone’s grandparents attic. We’re looking forward to a few nights sleep at the island. With our speed, and swell directions it’s noisy and I’ve had trouble getting more than an hour sleep here and there.

We’re 4 days into the first leg of our 8,000nm passage. The first stop is St Helena. If the wind gods would have stayed happy we would have been there in another 3 days…but alas the wind has died off and we’re huffing and puffing into the asym. We’re in the groove now, eating well, and having a great time. With 4 onboard, the watches are decent. 4h during the day and 3 at night. It means that you have every 4th day without a night watch. No fish yet, well a huge one and took and almost all our line and that we lost. Our sushi kit is waiting patiently. The boat rocks, has great power but the sail plan makes it easy to gear down quickly. We love the Genoa and Code wing on wing for easy night sailing. Treat surface area is as big as the asym! We’re halving a hockey watch party tonight, Ottawa vs Toronto in the playoffs. It’s going to be late, but our South African crew are keen to drink beer and cheer with us.

Sail maker and rigger onboard to tune every last detail. We always learn a lot when they join and geek out with us. Departure planned for a week from now, water maker is not happy and we need a few more fixes. Then off we go! Can’t wait. Feels surreal.

Had a bit of everything wind wise, from sun to fog. Wind mostly behind us, until around Cape of Good Hope and then on the nose. Fantastic crew and good memories. Now for a few weeks in Cape Town to fix and buy things and off again on the crossing.

If you can’t repair it, maybe it shouldn’t be on board. Last 10 days have been so fun, learning from the incredible team at Balance/Nexus St Francis. We’ve commissions everything, my spreadsheet had 352 rows, crawled into every corner and broken everything we could and then fixed. I’m going to miss this team. A lot. Photo shoot tomorrow and then off to Cape Town on Thursday. Sporty forecast along the south coast of Africa, time to see what she can do in big seas.

Spent the day checking and tuning the main boom locks and lower shrouds. Got the load sensors hooked up and calibrated. Then pulled out the code and pointed downwind and loaded her up. A nice easy 20kts boat speed was fun! Tomorrow we fix the hydrolic furler and setup Genoa and start instrument calibration.

We got extremely lucky, weather gods liked us as it was a full sun and 10kts. The south ocean is usually in a bad mood. We hoisted all the sail except for the code which we will do tomorrow. We got 10.5kts in 10kts of breeze. She’s a Ferrari 😆