Last night we had very light winds and a few small squalls with rain. Time to get the rain gear back on deck. Around 6 AM the wind came back and seems to be established for the duration of the race. As the wind build up, we removed the spinnaker that had been on for about 2 days. Karine and I went on deck to bring the spinnaker down. That was not easy because by then the wind had built up nicely.
Right now, the wind is stable at about 20 knots with very confused seas. If you follow our track on YB, you can see that we are taking a mostly west route before going south in about 2 days. All of this is obviously subject to change.
In the previous post we mentioned how rare it is to meet boats at sea. Today we met one of our fellow racers on Jeanneau 43 named Shadowfax. They have a crew of 7 and were sailing much faster than us with their symmetrical spinnaker.
On the subject of weather, we download GRIB files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRIB) twice a day. These files give us a condensed form a preview of the weather for the coming days.