Subject: Report as of 12:00 EST Nov. 7, 2005 - Next report in 24 hours At Sea - 528 NM NW of Fajardo, PR PART ONE FOR ALL Mileage-wise has Bluewater passed the halfway point in this passage. A few minutes ago we dipped below latitude 26, and the sea temperature reflects our southern locale: 84.6 degrees F. We're seeing lots of light squalls in the afternoon and overnight. Daytime highs are in the upper 80s and it's beginning to feel even more like the Tropics. The generators and air conditioners are getting more use now. To our delight, our little 6 kW genset easily carries the load of three air conditioners or two AC units and the watermaker, sipping little fuel in the process. For the naysayers, let me go on record as saying I'm really happy to have that second genset! To help cool the engine room, we're running with the main salon engine room hatch open when we're not using the salon. With that, we're able to keep the ER temperatures at 145 degrees or less so far, but as the outside air and water temperatures increase it seems unlikely that'll continue. Dean and I will probably arrive somewhere between rare and medium rare. It'll be very nice to get that ER problem taken care of! Dean said yesterday he felt the paravanes were costing us more than the two- to three-tenths of a knot we saw when we first deployed them, and that rang true to me. After thinking on it, I decided to pull the vanes and see what difference it would make; we pulled them just before 3 pm, so today's numbers reflect 21 hours run without the vanes. Our calculations show that the vanes were actually costing us about .4 knot or close to 10 NM per day. Until we pulled them, we were averaging close to 6.5 knots at 1900 RPMs, but with the vanes stowed we're closer to the 7.0 knots experienced by many other N47 owners. Now that we're running the active fin stabilizers full time, the motion of the boat is quite different. To me it feels "freed-up" without the drag from the vanes. I prefer the new motion to the old, but I like the increased speed even more. Our experience with the paravanes has shown me, however, that they are a "great backup system," as the NAR movie says. Scott Flanders e-mailed overnight that he felt our reported fuel burn might be high and wondered whether we've actually measured it. We have three separate fuel burn tables for the N47 with the Lugger 668T, none of them in agreement with the others. Based on the 1800 NM we did in this boat before beginning this passage and on input from the fuel burn tables, I used an estimate of 5.0 GPH for the mains. But Scott spurred us into action! After one false start this morning, Dean and I used the excellent Nordhavn fuel management system to measure our exact consumption at our run speed of 1900 RPMs with the 6 kW genset running at 60% load, stabilizers on line, and paravanes not deployed. The measured fuel burn: 5.6 GPH. In my experience, the 6 kW genset burns .5 to .6 GPH, so my 5 GPH estimate for the main engine was not far from the mark, Scott. This N47 hull shape is not as efficient as your N46, but then you knew that! Yesterday I was singing the praises of XM Radio. Here's chapter 2. We have lost all XM channels except one: channel 24, Sunny, which plays a mix of middle-of-the-road standards and is one of our favorites. All other channels we've tried come up with "no signal". Given that this is a satellite-based delivery system, I'm wondering what's happening there. Do they have more than one satellite? Is Sunny being delivered to the Caribbean on one satellite and Eastern USA on another? My previous estimates for Bluewater's ETA at Fajardo in our earlier reports were based on Nobeltec's charting software, and they were wrong. We've found a bug in Nobeltec. (For your Nobeltec users, we are using Nobeltec Admiral build 7.1.900.) Putting the cursor on the route brings up distance to go and time to go to the final waypoint, and I was using that. Yesterday I calculated it differently and found the Nobeltec number in error. It lists the number of days, hours, and minutes to gobut in every case it says "0" hours, the result of bad code in the program. Using a different feature in Nobeltec, we get the real answer-several hours later than we reported yesterday. PART TWO FOR OMNI WEATHER Thanks, Bob, for your overnight forecast. We're still delighted and a little surprised with the mostly benign conditions we've had to date, but we will be ready for the increased winds and seas you foresee near the end of the trip, still mindful of your expectation that they will not be ahead of the beam. The high seawater temperatures and squally conditions have me thinking about the potential for tropical development, even though we're into November. It's my guess that, as NOAA is fond of saying, "no tropical development is expected in the next 24 hours." PART THREE FOR ALL Position 28-10.3 N / 72-00.0 W as of 12:00 EST Monday, Nov. 7, 2005 Course 160 deg M Speed 7.1 kts @ 1900 RPM 528 NM to go to Fajardo Distance made good last 24 hours 163 NM, average speed 6.8 kts, distance from Beaufort 631 NM, average speed from Beaufort 6.6 kts. Total fuel consumed 530 gals, fuel remaining 940 gals, trip avg 1.2 NMPG and 5.5 GPH. Conditions: Wind 120 deg M @15-18 kts., swells 2-4 ft from 130 deg. M, partly cloudly, Visibility excellent. Barometer 1021.7 mb and falling slowly. Sea water temp 85 deg F, air temp 87 deg F. ETA Fajardo: 1500, Thursday, Nov. 10. All is well. --Milt, Judy, Dean and Schipperke Katy