The Visual Passage Planner provided the following report for our trip. Check below to see what it was really like. 

Shearwater II made all of her waypoints plus a few more added in for the fun of it. Amazingly the GPS and auto pilot brought us directly to the point where we picked up our approaches to each of our ports of call.  

We took 37 sailing days to reach Trinidad. After Fernando we took a detours to visit Forteleza, Brazil and to drop off Gary in Barbados. We then leisurely took an overnight sail to beautiful Tobago for Christmas and at last to our destination Trinidad only a day sail away. The first part of our journey after the blow out of South Africa was slow and peaceful and down right easy. The leg from Forteleza to Barbados was wild and woolly. We were glad to see that come to an end as we were quite tired after 7.5 days of high winds and pounding seas. That's the price you pay for average 195 mile days.

Here's how we fared:

Leg 1     Broad Reach: 3 days out of Cape Town = 25%, Running: 9 days = 75% spinnaker tears

Leg 2    Running: 100% spinnaker tears again

Leg 3    Running: 100% spinnaker tears for the third time.

Leg 4    Broad Reaching: 100% When we ran the program for this report we used November as the month of travel. However, in reality the last leg was in early December. If we had run the report for this leg using December it would have called for considerably more Broad Reaching.

We never experienced the ITZ, Inter Tropical Conversion Zone, well known as the doldrums.