Trip log this morning stood at 394 miles, making a day’s run of 140 miles, not bad given the light conditions.

We had a comfortable night with winds below 15 knots and seas around 1.5m. The autopilot mercifully steered without hiccup, except when crew chose to hand steer. They are unstoppable now! Apparently that’s what you do when you wake up and find you’ve fallen asleep while on watch at 4AM.

The pleasant conditions persisted all day. The swell period is a bit short and the odd cross wave rolls through, but that’s just being a bit picky now. We made another 71 miles between 7AM and 7PM, pretty much directly towards Martinique, 1,650 miles west of our current position.

The latest forecast shows the weather for next week still easing, with wind and swell forecast to briefly peak at 18 knots / 2.8m in the early hours of Thursday. We adjusted our route to suit the new forecast and turned directly west. The long range forecast is for light winds / motoring the last two days, but the models diverge on where the light winds will be, so we are just keeping an eye on that for now.

The autopilot did not disengage so far today, touch wood.

We had pretty good sunlight around the middle of the day, and were a bit shocked to find we had hit the current limit on our 60A Renogy MPPT charge controller. Nonetheless, we pretty much got the house bank fully charged by around 3PM, despite the main meal being prepared using the electric pressure cooker and induction cooktop. We are considering options for adding a second charge controller before we cross the Pacific. This will reduce the temperature of the controller, provide redundancy and allow us to use the full capacity of our solar array with the sun directly overhead.

A little more development was done on the instrument prototype and the “smalls” were washed and dried. Always good to get some laundry done while the weather is good!

Main meal was Spaghetti Gorgonzola with walnuts. Another feast!

Forecast for tonight is more of the same weather, so looking forward to a quiet night.