No sooner had we sent our blog, whilst cooking breakfast, the generator overheated. There ensued four days of “heads in generator compartment”. We checked fresh water coolant for seawater ingress; pumped a sample of oil from the sump looking for water; checked hoses, clamps and plugs for leakage and it remains a mystery why we’re losing around a litre of engine coolant a day. The good news is we have 20 litres of coolant and when we replace each day, the litres that we have lost, we have no overheating and we can continue to cook and make water. To be investigated more fully and hopefully solved in port.
How do you cross 3,700 nm of ocean in a vessel that only travels around 6 nm an hour? The answer is obviously slowly! For planning purposes we work on covering 150 nm per day and as you can see from the chart we started our trip on a bit of a flyer. Several days we almost achieved 200 nm. Since then our progress has slowed and at current rate we expect to be in Salvador on Thursday. A total of twenty-three days at sea.
Salvador will be the first time either of us has been in South America and we look forward to reporting our findings soon.