The best thing about tradewinds sailing is that the miles are put under the keel hour after hour, day after day, with no great changes necessary in sail trim or area. It is very satisfying to check the set of the sails and see that everything is perfect just as it is, just where it was set this morning, or yesterday. That is pretty much the kind of sailing that we are enjoying now. The wind has been steady in direction, and has only risen and fallen in strength through a small enough range that there haven't really been any sail changes necessary, except for taking in the main last night when it seemed that the wind was going to increase after sunset. Even though the main engines haven't been started in two days, we are still only getting about 14 nautical miles to the gallon of fuel burned. We still need to use diesel to keep the stove running, and to generate electricity for powering the refrigeration, lights, pumps, and navigational equipment. I find it interesting to put this into a miles per gallon figure because then I can relate it to, say, driving a car or truck down the coast. It shows relatively how efficient this mode of travel is. 14 miles to the gallon doesn't seem very impressive until one has a better idea of what we are getting for our fuel burned. Here we are, moving almost 100 tons of wood, lead, bronze and canvas down the coast while providing life support and conveniences for 14 people and we are only burning about 10 gallons of fuel per day. That's not too bad. If these same 14 people were living shoreside it is almost certain that almost each one of us would have used energy equivalent to or exceeding the 10 gallons that we burned aboard Amistad today. Of course, if we were to start the engines to power ourselves along the picture looks very different. If we had to power, we would only get about 1 mile to the gallon, and our fuel stores would be used up well before we reached our intended destination of Freetown. I personally like the fact that we have to sail those miles. This is a sailing ship, after all, and she does sail beautifully.
Later all,
Barry
 

Comments (0)