Autopilot belt broke again in the morning; we hand-steered rather than trying to fabricate another short-term replacement as we only had 110Nm to go. Dave got a little cooked helming for the majority of the day, and Charlie was frazzled trying to look after the kids while they were hyper-excited. But we got there!
Loads of wildlife as we were approaching land: flying fish for most of the day, welcome-to-the-caribbean dolphins, birds…
Sailing wise it was a long day of motor-sailing – not the best way to end a passage that was generally great from a sailing point of view, but we cant control the weather can we? One option was to slow sail the rest of the trip, but that would have required hand-steering for longer, or attempting to set up the redundant auto-pilot left by the previous owner of our boat. Saw land from 40 miles or so away, making the last 7-8 hours a funny mix of excruciating and exciting. Arthur tried to stay up after dinner, drawing an excellent boat (complete with saildrive, propeller and rudder) and generally trying to keep himself occupied. But he didn’t quite make it to the anchorage!
We got there about 9:30pm local time (11:30pm on our halfway house time zone that we were operating in from partway across)!!! There was plenty of space in a massive anchorage, but we still hate anchoring at night so looked around for an un-necessarily large space. Dropped anchor in 6m or so, checked we were not dragging, celebrated, slept.
dav