Sunday evening, there is a lovely northeast breeze, a gentle motion, a half a knot of positive current, and we are at sea. It would have been fun to greet our Las Palmas neighbors on the Swan 80, Berenice, when they arrive Monday, but after sitting for three days we have itchy feet and so we are off. The current plan is direct to Fort Lauderdale where Wind Horse shall spend the winter.

The projected route takes us through the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, then along the Bahamas southern and western flanks. Navigation should be more interesting than that of the recently completed “Pond” crossing.

When the Port Authorities saw our clearance paperwork this morning they could not understand why anyone would leave so soon after crossing the Atlantic, let alone tack on 1400 miles to Florida without a stop. You might be wondering the same.

The reasoning is straightforward: we are comfortable at sea, we have had a friend join us for the passage so the watch standing will be easier, and there is a good weather forecast we do not want to waste.

Now a comment for the gear heads reading this. For the last half of our crossing from Las Palmas the exhaust gas temperature (EGT) for the starboard engine ran about five percent warmer than the port, notice that something had changed. It could have been an injector issue but a clean exhaust ruled this out. The prop was OK. That left air flow, i.e the turbo.

Once underway we did a couple of tests at wide open throttle to check EGT and max RPM. The starboard engine was about 50 revs slower. Next we did both engines at WOT together. After logging this data we noticed the starboard engine EGT was now the same as the port at cruise RPMS. The theory here is the turbo must have been sticky, and the added pressure of running WOT has freed it.

At 0035Z the GPS is indicating 11.7 knots at 1800 RPM. Position: 14 55’14.28 N, 062 18’23.87 W