The Final Countdown

Well, the final countdown is upon us.

On Sunday, the Windleblo sets sail from Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, for St. Lucia in the Windward Islands. The 2,700 nautical mile voyage should take somewhere around 20 days to complete.

We are going across as part of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers -- or ARC -- an annual regatta of some 280 sailing yachts all crossing the Atlantic at the same time. It has been a remarkable couple of weeks of preparation here in Las Palmas and we have made many new friends who we will no doubt celebrate with once we make landfall in the Caribbean.

The ARC people have made it easy for you to follow our progress. Today, Windleblo was fitted with a Yellowbrick satellite tracker. All you need do to see where we are and check our weather conditions as we cross is click here. You will then go to the ARC Fleet Tracker website. There, you will need to select the ARC rally and then choose Windleblo from the drop down list of boats to find us.

You can also read our ARC blog by clicking here and finding Windleblo on the list of boats. We won't be able to keep up the windleblo.com website once we are away from Internet, but the ARC people have set up their site so we can send log entries to the ARC Windleblo blog via our Single Side Band radio. Marvelous!

Bookmark both the Fleet Tracker web page and the ARC Windleblo blog web page and come back often.

Many thanks to everyone who helped us get this far.