34:36S 119:53E
Tales of Amok's Adventures
Mike Jones
Sun 17 Nov 2013 12:37
Welcome to the blog. I knew I had to lure some of you off facebook!
As I was saying, this sailing is absolutely fantastic. We have been charging along on a broad reach, with speeds somewhere between 7 and 9 knots. Just slipped a second reef in the main (ie shortened sail for you landlubber types) to ease the motion before the night, and we are still going 7 1/2 knots. We've seen lots of albatross, but no whales. The albatross are magnificent to watch.
As the boys prepared a great spag bol for dinner, we held off on the fishing. The girls are feeling the effects of the swell and we are quiet and not complaining (true and hard to believe).
You will all be interested to hear no doubt that we are passing 3 seabed canyons just now, with the deepest having a depth in excess of 5000 metres. Again, it's hard to believe.
These Australian charts have a feature on them which we haven't seen before; it's a zone of confidence (ZOC) diagram. This is used when the surveyed area isn't all surveyed to the same level of accuracy, and the surveyors want to let you know their level of confidence for each area. It starts with A1 and states that position accuracy is good to +- 5m and the depth accuracy is =0.50m + 1% of the water depth. so pretty accurate. >From this ZOC, the table goes A2, B, C, D and then unsurveyed. The best description is category D whereby they give up on providing a tolerance in technical terms and just say "worse than ZOC C". Kind of like, we don't know how bad it is, but it's pretty bad... It'll be all eyes on deck if we have to pass through a C zone.
strange where you get your laughs when you are at sea.
We are hoping to arrive in Esperance tomorrow afternoon. Looking forward to visiting somewhere new.
hope everybody from Canada, US, UK, Australia and everywhere in between are all doing ok.
love
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