This SHOULD be two blogs by Archie and Fergus about weeks 3 and 4 in Gran Canaria, but they haven't written anything yet - we've all been rather busy! We'll try and get an update written over the next few days.
The main news is that we leave tomorrow for our first leg of the Atlantic Crossing, from Gran Canaria to Mindelo in the Cape Verde Islands. It's just under 900 miles, it should take us about 6 days, so we expect to arrive somtime on Saturday 16th. We're sailing with the ARC+ rally so as well as the usual tracking, you'll be able to follow us with the rest of the fleet on the ARC website.
https://www.worldcruising.com/arc_plus/eventfleetviewer.aspx
We've been joined by our extra crew for the crossing, Lauren and Tom, we've done a training sail, found some problems, fixed the problems, bought loads of food, stowed it away, and we're pretty much ready to go.
The boys were in Kids Club this week as part of the rally which they enjoyed, and they got to try getting into a liferaft (in a swimming pool!)
After a couple of weeks of managing to combine work on the boat with sightseeing, the last couple of weeks have been increasingly busy in the lead up to the start, but it's been fun meeting all the other crews (and their kids, being on the kid boat pontoon)
The rally have put on some good socials and seminars,
and we're feeling excited about the crossing.
The weather forecast is looking pretty good - light winds at the start and the first day or so but then increasing to some nice 15-20 knot trade winds for mpst of the passage and getting a bit lighter again towards the end. We'll report back on how accurate that is!
I'll try and add some pictures to this blog when we have some more time.
