Day fifteen - fifteen already!
Adonde
Neil & Tracy Batcheler
Tue 2 Jan 2007 18:46
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Noon position 16:29.3N 40:31.7W
Day's run a still crap 116nm
Well I'm surprised we only made 116nm in the last
24 hrs, as it seemed we were going quite well, even managing to cover a bit of
ground overnight in light-ish winds. We got the gennaker up this morning and
have had a reasonable breeze of between 15-20kts from the east for most of the
day, only dying off in the last hour or so. Unfortunately the breeze also caused
a horrible cross sea (I don't mean cross as in angry you understand, but
confused and lumpy, a bit like John Prescott) which bounced us around all over
the place and was very uncomfortable. The sea's calmed down a bit now and is
relatively flat which is a welcome relief even if it does mean the wind's
disappearing too. All that jumping about has made Tracy feel a bit icky for a
while, hopefully she'll feel better soon...
We've now dropped below the 1100-miles-to-go mark,
which is reassuring, although we'll be a lot happier when the chartplotter tells
us we've arrived - I think we've both had enough now but we've still got a while
to go...
I thought the techies among you may be interested
to know how we're managing to keep this blog updated from the middle of bloody
nowhere, so here's a explanation: the web diary is hosted, as you know, by
Mailasail. Before setting off from Las Palmas we set up the basic information,
and whenever we want to update the blog, which we're going to continue to try
and do every day at least until we can get to a pub, all we do is type whatever
we want to say into an email, include a photo if we like, and send said email to
a specific email address we have for this purpose. The computer at Mailasail's
end then extracts the info from the email and posts it on our webpage. As long
as I remember to put our position at the top of the email their computer will
also extract that and show it on the chart. Clever eh? Mind you, I have no way
of checking whether it's all working correctly as I can't go online to look at
it myself although apparently it was OK a week or so ago. We can't go online to
look at websites etc as the only way we can connect to the internet is by using
a satellite telephone (Motorola / Iridium) and this has a painfully slow data
transfer rate of 2400kbps at best, and often less as the connection isn't always
great. At $1.40 a minute we don't want to stay conected for too long every day,
hence only occasional low resolution photos. All emails sent to and from
Mailasail are compressed and this helps speed things up a bit. So, on the
assumption that it's all working correctly, now you
know!
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