Crossing the Pond Day 9

Finally the time has come for us to start getting ready for making land fall. We are approximately 7 hours from land, depending on the wind, this means it will be 01:00am St Helena time. Another night time entrance awaits us 😳

When we arrive in the next few hours, we have decided not to wait for day break and to just head go ahead and do the night anchor, otherwise we will just be bopping around outside the harbour all night very impatiently. Eric and Makyla will be on cross over shifts right at that time, most likely arriving as Eric comes on shift, by then we will all be up and ready to do our thing.

We obviously don't have control over our speed, as that is all in the capable material of Mr Oxley. We did consider taking him down and putting out the genoa to slow us down, so that we can arrive at dawn, but the decision was made to just crack on and do what we must in the middle of the night.

Heading is 279° 
AWS 7,5knts
SOG 5,2 knts
Wind direction: 130° on port

We have recently found out that the mooring balls are out of commission for whatever reason, so we will have to anchor, it's really deep more or less 20 meters deep and our chain is only 75-80m long. This means we will be putting out less than 4x our depth.
to give you some perspective, we usually prefer to anchor in 5 meters of water and we put out 5-7 times that in chain. Right or wrong who knows, but this was solid advice given to us by an old sea dog, and it has always worked for us, to prevent dragging. This time we have no choice so gonna have to work with it.

Any way ladies and gents, we are ready for this and very exccited to see this very remote island.

Needless to say we have some good South Africa witblitz tucked deep in the freezer as our first arrival shooter, believe me we are so ready for it.

Of course my daughter will have some solid tera firma under her feet to celebrate her 22 birthday on Friday, so we will make it just on time.
Brace your self St Helena here we come.😂🤣

EDIT TO ABOVE

We finally decided to take down Mr Oxley as when we look up ahead, there are some very dark clouds,  possibly rain and squalls. We not seeing anything on predict wind, however rather than fighting with the kite in bad weather in the dark, we playing on the side of caution, which of course does make me happy 😊 
We are now doing the whole of 2,9 knots.and will be arrive 4 hours later so probably about 4am and will only have to hang an hour or so for first light.