Hope is in the air! And there is a lot of air to give us a good push towards our destination.
The reason we sailed so far North when we left the Azores was to ride across to the top of the Iberian Peninsula with a prevailing tail wind. Then we would sail downwind along the Portuguese coast until we found our harbor and could comfortably sail into it.
You can see that up here, we were able to ride the steady and strong wind straight to our destination without the need to beat into the weather. The course is long, but much easier on the boat and on the crew because it is downwind. As winds pick up speed, so do we which then lowers the apparent wind felt by the boat and us inside the boat.
30 knots of wind when sailing downwind at 7 knots feels like 23 knots of wind. If we were beating into that at the same speed, it would feel like 37 knots of wind! That is quite the spread and we much prefer to be on the calmer side of the spectrum.
