Back to Basics

A quiet morning. We had a peculiar day yesterday, we were going nicely under assymetric from about 0900 and with all relatively quiet and in order Stephen worked out the time of Meridional  passage and dug out his sextant for the first time. Finding somewhere to shoot the sun when heading South ie, with the mast, Assymetric  etc. in the way proved a bit of a challenge but sitting on foredeck seemed to work. He came out with a  Latitude in only an hour or two which was well within tolerance at just under 3 miles difference from the GPS, a good first shot at the sun.  

I spent the afternoon stripping and servicing a winch on deck by the mast which had objected to all the green water it had been subjected to on the Way to the Canaries.

In the late afternoon the wind veered and died away and we had a frustrating night doing about 1 knot with the wind mostly astern and always very light.

The same dolphins seem to have stayed with us and kept us company  occasionally overnight and we had some whales too - unidentified big chaps overnight and a pod of Pilot whales as I was cooking a dinner of; Steak, Rosti (slightly burned), Leeks and gravy, we enjoyed this with some wine from a box, just opened, but having been on the boat since July which was off, well a little anyway, there were more complaints from other parts of ship, I thought it was a bit off but absolutely fine however it, may be that  I’m not the most sensitive to odd flavours.

We also heard what sounded like an owl in the evening but probably wasn’t, Quaile suspects a Storm Petrel.

This morning we’ve had the Dolphins come for a play again, which never loses it’s charm and we’ve set the pole with the genoa out to port and the main out to starboard, we’re making 2-3 knots, mostly, in about 5 knots of wind, we have actually been quite lucky in some regards because, now that the wind is light, the sea is quite calm other than a long low swell from the North West. This did shake the sail quite a bit overnight, and indeed is still doing so, but in the main it could be a lot worse.

We’ve had a quick guess at mileages for the 24 hours to Noon today, I’m guessing 65, Quaile, 42 and Alastair 32 so we’ll see in a couple of hours.

We’ve just seen a biggish shark but not close to and no idea of what flavour it might have been.

We are now going at 4 and half knots. Another improvement and we did 62 miles for the day to noon. It’s actually now a lovely day, we have the sprayhood down and are sailing on autopilot hoping the wind carries on being obliging to us.

Slainte for now.

Jock and the gang.