Aiming for the Azores

N 33 degrees 13.3 minutes
W 020 degrees 49.4 minutes

We are under way! – albeit quite slowly at the moment.

I eventually left (more to come on that at some point) on Friday morning.

I was feeling very tired for the first couple of days, with a disgusting taste in my mouth the whole time, and occasionally had trouble eating breakfast. It took till yesterday morning to start feeling pretty much normal again. It’s helped that conditions have generally been good, with some light spells, and I’ve been fortunate enough to generally have had fairly steady conditions overnight. Though it doesn’t really help you sleep when you’re sometimes uncertain as to whether you’ll find you’ve been making any ground towards your destination or not…

At least the decision about which way to head has generally been fairly simple – with the light winds and the current, I’ve been limited quite a lot of the time to ‘east or west’. West gains me ground towards the Azores, and keeps me further from the stronger winds that may develop towards the end of the week. East takes me straight back towards Madeira again and further from my destination, though I would be sailing at a more comfortable angle to the stronger wind later on.

Westwards, with as much north as I can gain, has always been my choice so far. I’m currently in a very calm spell, doing 1.5 knots at most, but the sea is fairly slight and I’m hopeful the wind will increase soon.

In the meantime I’ve been resting, reading, cleaning the galley, checking over the vegetable supplies, and reading up on the Azores a little. I’m not sure which island I’ll head for first, definitely something to decide when I’m a bit closer. Hopefully that’ll be later this week.

Right now I think I’m going to go and have a shower while there’s pretty much no wind chill.

p.s.
I’d finished writing the Madeira blogs and scheduled them before I left, so they’ll be interspersed with updates under way over this week – I suspect they’ll finish before I do an arrival one!