I hope everyone realizes now that Dracula literally cannot steer the ship. The captain tied himself to the helm and a crucifix (he alluded to this earlier in one of his logs) and thus Dracula can’t touch it.
Additionally Dracula’s powers weaken during the day (iirc he can be in sunlight but his powers don’t work) so he has to steer the ship via weather at night.
The man has been buffeting the ship with wind to get to England.
Some additional notes from a sailor. The demeter was a schooner, which means entirely for and aft rig. Our boy Dracula probably only has experience sailing Ottoman ships from the 1400s, if he has any experience at all. That means he expects ships to go downwind, period. Schooners don’t do that so well, they are designed as an air foil like the wing of an airplane. Much more efficient and stable if it can pull itself along the wind Rather than running before it.
So he eats all the sailors on board, presuming that he can keep it going with his power over the weather, and then the captain does him dirty by making the helm untouchable to him, and the schooner wouldn’t be reacting to the wind In The way he thinks it should be. So he’s buffeting this ship about every which way with the wind trying to figure out how to make it go, The demeter in the meantime is pitching and yawning, booms flying every which way, all the while the captain’s corpse is flopping at the wheel mocking him. He’s lucky The demeter didn’t roll right over.
It’s one of his most hilariously mismanaged situations. And I like to imagine that after the Captain finally died, he could stop playing it cool taunting him and then just started running around panicking and trying not to get knocked overboard everytime the booms jibbed, going ‘oh fuck, oh fuck, oh shit, oh fuck.’ so that when he finally pushes the demeter into an English harbor he makes his speedy disembarkation as a wolf not because he’s trying to be spooky and avoid humans, But because he wants to hell off this newfangled death trap That’s been trying to brain him with 20 ft long swinging clubs.